A consumptive Jew, possessed by a fanaticism which obstacles and hastening death intensified, had fixed on Deronda as the antitype of some visionary image, the offspring of wedded hope and despair: despair of his own life, irrepressible hope in the propagation of his fanatical beliefs. The instance was perhaps odd, exceptional in its form, but substantially it was not rare. Fanaticism was not so common as bankruptcy, but taken in all its aspects it was abundant enough. While Mordecai was waiting on the bridge for the fulfillment of his visions, another man was convinced that he had the mathematical key of the universe which would supersede Newton, and regarded all known physicists as conspiring to stifle his discovery and keep the universe locked; another, that he had the metaphysical key, with just that hair’s-breadth of difference from the old wards which would make it fit exactly. Scattered here and there in every direction you might find a terrible person, with more or less power of speech, and with an eye either glittering or preternaturally dull, on the look-out for the man who must hear him; and in most cases he had volumes which it was difficult to get printed, or if printed to get read. This Mordecai happened to have a more pathetic aspect, a more passionate, penetrative speech than was usual with such monomaniacs; he was more poetical than a social reformer with colored views of the new moral world in parallelograms, or than an enthusiast in sewage; still he came under the same class. It would be only right and kind to indulge him a little, to comfort him with such help as was practicable; but what likelihood was there that his notions had the sort of value he ascribed to them? In such cases a man of the world knows what to think beforehand. And as to Mordecai’s conviction that he had found a new executive self, it might be preparing for him the worst of disappointments—that which presents itself as final.


Great benefactors of mankind, deliverers,


Let the ages try the spirits, and see what they are worth?


You must believe my beliefs—be moved by my reasons—hope my hopes—see the vision I point to—behold a glory where I behold it!


My contempt for them binds me to see that I don’t adopt their mistake on a small scale, and make myself deaf with the assumption that there cannot be any momentous relation between this Jew and me, simply because he has clad it in illusory notions. What I can be to him, or he to me, may not at all depend on his persuasion about the way we came together. To me the way seems made up of plainly discernible links. If I had not found Mirah, it is probable that I should not have begun to be specially interested in the Jews, and certainly I should not have gone on that loitering search after an Ezra Cohen which made me pause at Ram’s book-shop and ask the price of Maimon. Mordecai, on his side, had his visions of a disciple, and he saw me by their light; I corresponded well enough with the image his longing had created. He took me for one of his race. Suppose that his impression—the elderly Jew at Frankfort seemed to have something like it—suppose in spite of all presumptions to the contrary, that his impression should somehow be proved true, and that I should come actually to share any of the ideas he is devoted to? This is the only question which really concerns the effect of our meeting on my life. But if the issue should be quite different?—well, there will be something painful to go through. I shall almost inevitably have to be an active cause of that poor fellow’s crushing disappointment. Perhaps this issue is the one I had need prepare myself for. I fear that no tenderness of mine can make his suffering lighter. Would the alternative—that I should not disappoint him—be less painful to me?


The bare possibility. I should be glad.


Wenn es eine Stufenleiter von Leiden giebt, so hat Israel die höchste Staffel erstiegen; wen die Dauer der Schmerzen und die Geduld, mit welcher sie ertragen werden, adeln, so nehmen es die Juden mit den Hochgeborenen aller Länder auf; wenn eine Literatur reich genannt wird, die wenige klassische Trauerspiele besitzt, welcher Platz gebührt dann einer Tragodie die anderthalb Jahrtausende wahrt, gedichtet und dargestellt von den Helden selber? If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the nations—if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they are borne ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land—if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?


done nothing but talk of it ever since.


mother and the children.


Stop! Don’t tread on my plate. Stop and see me throw it up again.


Is Mordecai in just now?


Where is he, Addy?


In the workroom there,


The fact is, sir, we don’t know what’s come to him this last day or two. He’s always what I may call a little touched, you know not quite so rational in all things, like you and me; but he’s mostly wonderful regular and industrious so far as a poor creature can be, and takes as much delight in the boy as anybody could. But this last day or two he’s been moving about like a sleep-walker, or else sitting as still as a wax figure.


It’s the disease, poor dear creature. I doubt whether he can stand long against it.


No; I think its only something he’s got in his head. He’s been turning over writing continually, and when I speak to him it takes him ever so long to hear and answer.


You may think us a little weak ourselves. But my wife and mother wouldn’t part with him if he was a still worse incumbrance. It isn’t that we don’t know the long and short of matters, but it’s our principle. There’s fools do business at a loss and don’t know it. I’m not one of ’em.


Oh, Mordecai carries a blessing inside him,


He’s got something the matter inside him. He said he couldn’t talk to me, and he wouldn’t have a bit o’ bun.


So far from wondering at your feeling for him. I already feel something of the same sort myself. I have lately talked to him at Ram’s book-shop—in fact, I promised to call for him here, that we might go out together.


That’s it, then! He’s been expecting you, and it’s taken hold of him. I suppose he talks about his learning to you. It’s uncommonly kind of you, sir; for I don’t suppose there’s much to be got out of it, else it wouldn’t have left him where he is. But there’s the shop.


I’ll call Mordecai for you, if you like.


No, Jacob, open the door for the gentleman, and let him go in himself Hush! Don’t make a noise.


I am come for you. Are you ready?


See my cup and ball! Fine, fine!


He’s come to life again, do you see?


I told you so: I’m mostly right. Well, sir, we mustn’t detain you now, I suppose; but I hope this isn’t the last time we shall see you.


Shall you come again? See, I can catch the ball; I’ll bet I catch it without stopping, if you come again.


He has clever hands. Which side of the family does he get them from?


My side. My wife’s family are not in that line. But bless your soul! ours is a sort of cleverness as good as gutta percha; you can twist it which way you like. There’s nothing some old gentlemen won’t do if you set ’em to it.


Old gentlemen, old gentlemen,


I shall never know anything decisive about these people until I ask Cohen pointblank whether he lost a sister named Mirah when she was six years old. The Cohens seem to have an affection for you,


And I for them. They have the heart of the Israelite within them, though they are as the horse and the mule, without understanding beyond the narrow path they tread.


I have caused you some uneasiness, I fear, by my slowness in fulfilling my promise. I wished to come yesterday, but I found it impossible.


Yes—yes, I trusted you. But it is true I have been uneasy, for the spirit of my youth has been stirred within me, and this body is not strong enough to bear the beating of its wings. I am as a man bound and imprisoned through long years: behold him brought to speech of his fellow and his limbs set free: he weeps, he totters, the joy within him threatens to break and overthrow the tabernacle of flesh.


You must not speak too much in this evening air. Cover your mouth with the woolen scarf. We are going to the Hand and Banner, I suppose, and shall be in private there?


No, that is my trouble that you did not come yesterday. For this is the evening of the club I spoke of, and we might not have any minutes alone until late, when all the rest are gone. Perhaps we had better seek another place. But I am used to that only. In new places the outer world presses on me and narrows the inward vision. And the people there are familiar with my face.


I don’t mind the club if I am allowed to go in. It is enough that you like this place best. If we have not enough time I will come again. What sort of club is it?


It is called ‘The Philosophers.’ They are few—like the cedars of Lebanon—poor men given to thought. But none so poor as I am: and sometimes visitors of higher worldly rank have been brought. We are allowed to introduce a friend, who is interested in our topics. Each orders beer or some other kind of drink, in payment for the room. Most of them smoke. I have gone when I could, for there are other men of my race who come, and sometimes I have broken silence. I have pleased myself with a faint likeness between these poor philosophers and the Masters who handed down the thought of our race—the great Transmitters, who labored with their hands for scant bread, but preserved and enlarged for us the heritage of memory, and saved the soul of Israel alive as a seed among the tombs. The heart pleases itself with faint resemblances.


I shall be very glad to go and sit among them, if that will suit you. It is a sort of meeting I should like to join in,


He has traveled and studied much.


Is the gentlemen anonymous? Is he a Great Unknown?


My name is Daniel Deronda. I am unknown, but not in any sense great.


You recommend the name, sir, and are welcome. Here, Mordecai, come to this corner against me,


This is what I call one of our touch-and-go nights, sir. Sometimes we stick pretty close to the point. But to-night our friend Pash, there, brought up the law of progress; and we got on statistics; then Lily, there, saying we knew well enough before counting that in the same state of society the same sort of things would happen, and it was no more wonder that quantities should remain the same, than that qualities should remain the same, for in relation to society numbers are qualities—the number of drunkards is a quality in society—the numbers are an index to the qualities, and give us no instruction, only setting us to consider the causes of difference between different social states—Lily saying this, we went off on the causes of social change, and when you came in I was going upon the power of ideas, which I hold to be the main transforming cause.


I don’t hold with you there, Miller. For either you mean so many sorts of things by ideas that I get no knowledge by what you say, any more than if you said light was a cause; or else you mean a particular sort of ideas, and then I go against your meaning as too narrow. For, look at it in one way, all actions men put a bit of thought into are ideas—say, sowing seed, or making a canoe, or baking clay; and such ideas as these work themselves into life and go on growing with it, but they can’t go apart from the material that set them to work and makes a medium for them. It’s the nature of wood and stone yielding to the knife that raises the idea of shaping them, and with plenty of wood and stone the shaping will go on. I look at it, that such ideas as are mixed straight away with all the other elements of life are powerful along with ’em. The slower the mixing, the less power they have. And as to the causes of social change, I look at it in this way—ideas are a sort of parliament, but there’s a commonwealth outside and a good deal of the commonwealth is working at change without knowing what the parliament is doing.


If you take ready mixing as your test of power, some of the least practical ideas beat everything. They spread without being understood, and enter into the language without being thought of.


They may act by changing the distribution of gases, instruments are getting so fine now, men may come to register the spread of a theory by observed changes in the atmosphere and corresponding changes in the nerves.


Yes, there is the idea of nationalities; I dare say the wild asses are snuffing it, and getting more gregarious.


You don’t share that idea?


Say, rather, he does not share that spirit. Unless nationality is a feeling, what force can it have as an idea?


Granted, Mordecai. And as the feeling of nationality is dying, I take the idea to be no better than a ghost, already walking to announce the death.


A sentiment may seem to be dying and yet revive into strong life. Nations have revived. We may live to see a great outburst of force in the Arabs, who are being inspired with a new zeal.


Amen, amen,


That may hold with backward nations, but with us in Europe the sentiment of nationality is destined to die out. It will last a little longer in the quarters where oppression lasts, but nowhere else. The whole current of progress is setting against it.


Ay, ye’ve done well to bring us round to the point. Ye’re all agreed that societies change—not always and everywhere—but on the whole and in the long run. Now, with all deference, I would beg t’ observe that we have got to examine the nature of changes before we have a warrant to call them progress, which word is supposed to include a bettering, though I apprehend it to be ill-chosen for that purpose, since mere motion onward may carry us to a bog or a precipice. And the questions I would put are three: Is all change in the direction of progress? if not, how shall we discern which change is progress and which not? and thirdly, how far and in what way can we act upon the course of change so as to promote it where it is beneficial, and divert it where it is injurious?


Change and progress are merged in the idea of development. The laws of development are being discovered, and changes taking place according to them are necessarily progressive; that is to say, it we have any notion of progress or improvement opposed to them, the notion is a mistake.


I really can’t see how you arrive at that sort of certitude about changes by calling them development. There will still remain the degrees of inevitableness in relation to our own will and acts, and the degrees of wisdom in hastening or retarding; there will still remain the danger of mistaking a tendency which should be resisted for an inevitable law that we must adjust ourselves to,—which seems to me as bad a superstition or false god as any that has been set up without the ceremonies of philosophizing.


That is a truth. Woe to the men who see no place for resistance in this generation! I believe in a growth, a passage, and a new unfolding of life whereof the seed is more perfect, more charged with the elements that are pregnant with diviner form. The life of a people grows, it is knit together and yet expanded, in joy and sorrow, in thought and action; it absorbs the thought of other nations into its own forms, and gives back the thought as new wealth to the world; it is a power and an organ in the great body of the nations. But there may come a check, an arrest; memories may be stifled, and love may be faint for the lack of them; or memories may shrink into withered relics—the soul of a people, whereby they know themselves to be one, may seem to be dying for want of common action. But who shall say, ‘The fountain of their life is dried up, they shall forever cease to be a nation?’ Who shall say it? Not he who feels the life of his people stirring within his own. Shall he say, ‘That way events are wending, I will not resist?’ His very soul is resistance, and is as a seed of fire that may enkindle the souls of multitudes, and make a new pathway for events.


I don’t deny patriotism, but we all know you have a particular meaning, Mordecai. You know Mordecai’s way of thinking, I suppose. I’m a rational Jew myself. I stand by my people as a sort of family relations, and I am for keeping up our worship in a rational way. I don’t approve of our people getting baptised, because I don’t believe in a Jew’s conversion to the Gentile part of Christianity. And now we have political equality, there’s no excuse for a pretense of that sort. But I am for getting rid of all of our superstitions and exclusiveness. There’s no reason now why we shouldn’t melt gradually into the populations we live among. That’s the order of the day in point of progress. I would as soon my children married Christians as Jews. And I’m for the old maxim, ‘A man’s country is where he’s well off.’


That country’s not so easy to find, Gideon. You get ten shillings a-week more than I do, and have only half the number of children. If somebody will introduce a brisk trade in watches among the ‘Jerusalem wares,’ I’ll go—eh, Mordecai, what do you say?


What I say is, let every man keep far away from the brotherhood and inheritance he despises. Thousands on thousands of our race have mixed with the Gentiles as Celt with Saxon, and they may inherit the blessing that belongs to the Gentile. You cannot follow them. You are one of the multitudes over this globe who must walk among the nations and be known as Jews, and with words on their lips which mean, ‘I wish I had not been born a Jew, I disown any bond with the long travail of my race, I will outdo the Gentile in mocking at our separateness,’ they all the while feel breathing on them the breath of contempt because they are Jews, and they will breathe it back poisonously. Can a fresh-made garment of citizenship weave itself straightway into the flesh and change the slow deposit of eighteen centuries? What is the citizenship of him who walks among a people he has no hardy kindred and fellowship with, and has lost the sense of brotherhood with his own race? It is a charter of selfish ambition and rivalry in low greed. He is an alien of spirit, whatever he may be in form; he sucks the blood of mankind, he is not a man, sharing in no loves, sharing in no subjection of the soul, he mocks it all. Is it not truth I speak, Pash?


Not exactly, Mordecai, if you mean that I think the worse of myself for being a Jew. What I thank our fathers for is that there are fewer blockheads among us than among other races. But perhaps you are right in thinking the Christians don’t like me so well for it.


Catholics and Protestants have not liked each other much better. We must wait patiently for prejudices to die out. Many of our people are on a footing with the best, and there’s been a good filtering of our blood into high families. I am for making our expectations rational.


And so am I! I, too, claim to be a rational Jew. But what is it to be rational—what is it to feel the light of the divine reason growing stronger within and without? It is to see more and more of the hidden bonds that bind and consecrate change as a dependent growth—yea, consecrate it with kinship: the past becomes my parent and the future stretches toward me the appealing arms of children. Is it rational to drain away the sap of special kindred that makes the families of men rich in interchanged wealth, and various as the forests are various with the glory of the cedar and the palm? When it is rational to say, ‘I know not my father or my mother, let my children be aliens to me, that no prayer of mine may touch them,’ then it will be rational for the Jew to say, ‘I will seek to know no difference between me and the Gentile, I will not cherish the prophetic consciousness of our nationality—let the Hebrew cease to be, and let all his memorials be antiquarian trifles, dead as the wall-paintings of a conjectured race. Yet let his child learn by rote the speech of the Greek, where he abjures his fellow-citizens by the bravery of those who fought foremost at Marathon—let him learn to say that was noble in the Greek, that is the spirit of an immortal nation! But the Jew has no memories that bind him to action; let him laugh that his nation is degraded from a nation; let him hold the monuments of his law which carried within its frame the breath of social justice, of charity, and of household sanctities—let him hold the energy of the prophets, the patient care of the Masters, the fortitude of martyred generations, as mere stuff for a professorship. The business of the Jew in all things is to be even as the rich Gentile.’


I submit, that ye’re traveling away from the questions I put concerning progress.


Say they’re levanting, Buchan. Never mind. Let us have a Jewish night; we’ve not had one for a long while. Let us take the discussion on Jewish ground. I suppose we’ve no prejudice here; we’re all philosophers; and we like our friends Mordecai, Pash, and Gideon, as well as if they were no more kin to Abraham than the rest of us. We’re all related through Adam, until further showing to the contrary, and if you look into history we’ve all got some discreditable forefathers. So I mean no offence when I say I don’t think any great things of the part the Jewish people have played in the world. What then? I think they were iniquitously dealt by in past times. And I suppose we don’t want any men to be maltreated, white, black, brown, or yellow—I know I’ve just given my half-crown to the contrary. And that reminds me, I’ve a curious old German book—I can’t read it myself, but a friend of mine was reading out of it to me the other day—about the prejudices against the Jews, and the stories used to be told against ’em, and what do you think one was? Why, that they’re punished with a bad odor in their bodies; and that, says the author, date 1715 (I’ve just been pricing and marking the book this very morning)—that is true, for the ancients spoke of it. But then, he says, the other things are fables, such as that the odor goes away all at once when they’re baptized, and that every one of the ten tribes, mind you, all the ten being concerned in the crucifixion, has got a particular punishment over and above the smell:—Asher, I remember, has the right arm a handbreadth shorter than the left, and Naphthali has pig’s ears and a smell of live pork. What do you think of that? There’s been a good deal of fun made of rabbinical fables, but in point of fables my opinion is, that all over the world it’s six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. However, as I said before, I hold with the philosophers of the last century that the Jews have played no great part as a people, though Pash will have it they’re clever enough to beat all the rest of the world. But if so, I ask, why haven’t they done it?


For the same reason that the cleverest men in the country don’t get themselves or their ideas into Parliament, because the blockheads are too many for ’em.


That is a vain question, whether our people would beat the rest of the world. Each nation has its own work, and is a member of the world, enriched by the work of each. But it is true, as Jehuda-ha-Levi first said, that Israel is the heart of mankind, if we mean by heart the core of affection which binds a race and its families in dutiful love, and the reverence for the human body which lifts the needs of our animal life into religion, and the tenderness which is merciful to the poor and weak and to the dumb creature that wears the yoke for us.


They’re not behind any nation in arrogance, and if they have got in the rear, it has not been because they were over-modest.


Oh, every nation brags in its turn,


and some of them in the Hebrew text.


Well, whatever the Jews contributed at one time, they are a stand-still people. They are the type of obstinate adherence to the superannuated. They may show good abilities when they take up liberal ideas, but as a race they have no development in them.


That is false! Let their history be known and examined; let the seed be sifted, let its beginning be traced to the weed of the wilderness—the more glorious will be the energy that transformed it. Where else is there a nation of whom it may be as truly said that their religion and law and moral life mingled as the stream of blood in the heart and made one growth—where else a people who kept and enlarged their spiritual store at the very time when they are hated with a hatred as fierce as the forest fires that chase the wild beast from his covert? There is a fable of the Roman, that swimming to save his life he held the roll of his writings between his teeth and saved them from the waters. But how much more than that is true of our race? They struggled to keep their place among the nations like heroes—yea, when the hand was hacked off, they clung with their teeth; but when the plow and the harrow had passed over the last visible signs of their national covenant, and the fruitfulness of their land was stifled with the blood of the sowers and planters, they said, ‘The spirit is alive, let us make it a lasting habitation—lasting because movable—so that it may be carried from generation to generation, and our sons unborn may be rich in the things that have been, and possess a hope built on an unchangeable foundation.’ They said it and they wrought it, though often breathing with scant life, as in a coffin, or as lying wounded amid a heap of slain. Hooted and scared like the unknown dog, the Hebrew made himself envied for his wealth and wisdom, and was bled of them to fill the bath of Gentile luxury; he absorbed knowledge, he diffused it; his dispersed race was a new Phoenicia working the mines of Greece and carrying their products to the world. The native spirit of our tradition was not to stand still, but to use records as a seed and draw out the compressed virtues of law and prophecy; and while the Gentile, who had said, ‘What is yours is ours, and no longer yours,’ was reading the letter of our law as a dark inscription, or was turning its parchments into shoe-soles for an army rabid with lust and cruelty, our Masters were still enlarging and illuminating with fresh-fed interpretation. But the dispersion was wide, the yoke of oppression was a spiked torture as well as a load; the exile was forced afar among brutish people, where the consciousness of his race was no clearer to him than the light of the sun to our fathers in the Roman persecution, who had their hiding-place in a cave, and knew not that it was day save by the dimmer burning of their candles. What wonder that multitudes of our people are ignorant, narrow, superstitious? What wonder? What wonder? The night is unto them, that they have no vision; in their darkness they are unable to divine; the sun is gone down over the prophets, and the day is dark above them; their observances are as nameless relics. But which among the chief of the Gentile nations has not an ignorant multitude? They scorn our people’s ignorant observance; but the most accursed ignorance is that which has no observance—sunk to the cunning greed of the fox, to which all law is no more than a trap or the cry of the worrying hound. There is a degradation deep down below the memory that has withered into superstition. In the multitudes of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the divine Unity, the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking toward a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West—which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will vanish, not in the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination of great facts which widen feeling, and make all knowledge alive as the young offspring of beloved memories.


You have your own way of looking at things, Mordecai, and as you say, your own way seems to you rational. I know you don’t hold with the restoration of Judea by miracle, and so on; but you are as well aware as I am that the subject has been mixed with a heap of nonsense both by Jews and Christians. And as to the connection of our race with Palestine, it has been perverted by superstition till it’s as demoralizing as the old poor-law. The raff and scum go there to be maintained like able-bodied paupers, and to be taken special care of by the angel Gabriel when they die. It’s no use fighting against facts. We must look where they point; that’s what I call rationality. The most learned and liberal men among us who are attached to our religion are for clearing our liturgy of all such notions as a literal fulfillment of the prophecies about restoration, and so on. Prune it of a few useless rites and literal interpretations of that sort, and our religion is the simplest of all religions, and makes no barrier, but a union, between us and the rest of the world.


As plain as a pike-staff. You pluck it up by the roots, strip off the leaves and bark, shave off the knots, and smooth it at top and bottom; put it where you will, it will do no harm, it will never sprout. You may make a handle of it, or you may throw it on the bonfire of scoured rubbish. I don’t see why our rubbish is to be held sacred any more than the rubbish of Brahmanism or Buddhism.


No, no, Pash, because you have lost the heart of the Jew. Community was felt before it was called good. I praise no superstition, I praise the living fountains of enlarging belief. What is growth, completion, development? You began with that question, I apply it to the history of our people. I say that the effect of our separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality. That is the fulfillment of the religious trust that moulded them into a people, whose life has made half the inspiration of the world. What is it to me that the ten tribes are lost untraceably, or that multitudes of the children of Judah have mixed themselves with the Gentile populations as a river with rivers? Behold our people still! Their skirts spread afar; they are torn and soiled and trodden on; but there is a jeweled breastplate. Let the wealthy men, the monarchs of commerce, the learned in all knowledge, the skilful in all arts, the speakers, the political counselors, who carry in their veins the Hebrew blood which has maintained its vigor in all climates, and the pliancy of the Hebrew genius for which difficulty means new device—let them say, ‘we will lift up a standard, we will unite in a labor hard but glorious like that of Moses and Ezra, a labor which shall be a worthy fruit of the long anguish whereby our fathers maintained their separateness, refusing the ease of falsehood.’ They have wealth enough to redeem the soil from debauched and paupered conquerors; they have the skill of the statesman to devise, the tongue of the orator to persuade. And is there no prophet or poet among us to make the ears of Christian Europe tingle with shame at the hideous obloquy of Christian strife which the Turk gazes at as at the fighting of beasts to which he has lent an arena? There is store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old—a republic where there is equality of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western freedom amid the despotisms of the East. Then our race shall have an organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a defense in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishmen of America. And the world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom: there will be a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West. Difficulties? I know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of sublime achievement move in the great among our people, and the work will begin.


Ay, we may safely admit that, Mordecai. When there are great men on ’Change, and high-flying professors converted to your doctrine, difficulties will vanish like smoke.


If we look back to the history of efforts which have made great changes, it is astonishing how many of them seemed hopeless to those who looked on in the beginning. Take what we have all heard and seen something of—the effort after the unity of Italy, which we are sure soon to see accomplished to the very last boundary. Look into Mazzini’s account of his first yearning, when he was a boy, after a restored greatness and a new freedom to Italy, and of his first efforts as a young man to rouse the same feelings in other young men, and get them to work toward a united nationality. Almost everything seemed against him; his countrymen were ignorant or indifferent, governments hostile, Europe incredulous. Of course the scorners often seemed wise. Yet you see the prophecy lay with him. As long as there is a remnant of national consciousness, I suppose nobody will deny that there may be a new stirring of memories and hopes which may inspire arduous action.


Amen. What is needed is the leaven—what is needed is the seed of fire. The heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions; it lives in their veins as a power without understanding, like the morning exultation of herds; it is the inborn half of memory, moving as in a dream among writings on the walls, which it sees dimly but cannot divide into speech. Let the torch of visible community be lit! Let the reason of Israel disclose itself in a great outward deed, and let there be another great migration, another choosing of Israel to be a nationality whose members may still stretch to the ends of the earth, even as the sons of England and Germany, whom enterprise carries afar, but who still have a national hearth and a tribunal of national opinion. Will any say ‘It cannot be’? Baruch Spinoza had not a faithful Jewish heart, though he had sucked the life of his intellect at the breasts of Jewish tradition. He laid bare his father’s nakedness and said, ‘They who scorn him have the higher wisdom.’ Yet Baruch Spinoza confessed, he saw not why Israel should not again be a chosen nation. Who says that the history and literature of our race are dead? Are they not as living as the history and literature of Greece and Rome, which have inspired revolutions, enkindled the thought of Europe, and made the unrighteous powers tremble? These were an inheritance dug from the tomb. Ours is an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in millions of human frames.


It may seem well enough on one side to make so much of our memories and inheritance as you do, Mordecai; but there’s another side. It isn’t all gratitude and harmless glory. Our people have inherited a good deal of hatred. There’s a pretty lot of curses still flying about, and stiff settled rancor inherited from the times of persecution. How will you justify keeping one sort of memory and throwing away the other? There are ugly debts standing on both sides.


I justify the choice as all other choice is justified. I cherish nothing for the Jewish nation, I seek nothing for them, but the good which promises good to all the nations. The spirit of our religious life, which is one with our national life, is not hatred of aught but wrong. The Master has said, an offence against man is worse than an offence against God. But what wonder if there is hatred in the breasts of Jews, who are children of the ignorant and oppressed—what wonder, since there is hatred in the breasts of Christians? Our national life was a growing light. Let the central fire be kindled again, and the light will reach afar. The degraded and scorned of our race will learn to think of their sacred land, not as a place for saintly beggary to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on the old, purified and enriched by the experience our greatest sons have gathered from the life of the ages. How long is it?—only two centuries since a vessel carried over the ocean the beginning of the great North American nation. The people grew like meeting waters—they were various in habit and sect—there came a time, a century ago, when they needed a polity, and there were heroes of peace among them. What had they to form a polity with but memories of Europe, corrected by the vision of a better? Let our wise and wealthy show themselves heroes. They have the memories of the East and West, and they have the full vision of a better. A new Persia with a purified religion magnified itself in art and wisdom. So will a new Judea, poised between East and West—a covenant of reconciliation. Will any say, the prophetic vision of your race has been hopelessly mixed with folly and bigotry: the angel of progress has no message for Judaism—it is a half-buried city for the paid workers to lay open—the waters are rushing by it as a forsaken field? I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice. The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The Messianic time is the time when Israel shall will the planting of the national ensign. The Nile overflowed and rushed onward: the Egyptian could not choose the overflow, but he chose to work and make channels for the fructifying waters, and Egypt became the land of corn. Shall man, whose soul is set in the royalty of discernment and resolve, deny his rank and say, I am an onlooker, ask no choice or purpose of me? That is the blasphemy of this time. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. Let us contradict the blasphemy, and help to will our own better future and the better future of the world—not renounce our higher gift and say, ‘Let us be as if we were not among the populations;’ but choose our full heritage, claim the brotherhood of our nation, and carry into it a new brotherhood with the nations of the Gentiles. The vision is there; it will be fulfilled.


In the doctrine of the Cabbala, souls are born again and again in new bodies till they are perfected and purified, and a soul liberated from a worn-out body may join the fellow-soul that needs it, that they may be perfected together, and their earthly work accomplished. Then they will depart from the mortal region, and leave place for new souls to be born out of the store in the eternal bosom. It is the lingering imperfection of the souls already born into the mortal region that hinders the birth of new souls and the preparation of the Messianic time:—thus the mind has given shape to what is hidden, as the shadow of what is known, and has spoken truth, though it were only in parable. When my long-wandering soul is liberated from this weary body, it will join yours, and its work will be perfected.


Everything I can in conscience do to make your life effective I will do.


I know it. I heard it. You see it all—you are by my side on the mount of vision, and behold the paths of fulfillment which others deny. You will take up my life where it was broken. I feel myself back in that day when my life was broken. The bright morning sun was on the quay—it was at Trieste—the garments of men from all nations shone like jewels—the boats were pushing off—the Greek vessel that would land us at Beyrout was to start in an hour. I was going with a merchant as his clerk and companion. I said, I shall behold the lands and people of the East, and I shall speak with a fuller vision. I breathed then as you do, without labor; I had the light step and the endurance of youth, I could fast, I could sleep on the hard ground. I had wedded poverty, and I loved my bride—for poverty to me was freedom. My heart exulted as if it had been the heart of Moses ben Maimon, strong with the strength of three score years, and knowing the work that was to fill them. It was the first time I had been south; the soul within me felt its former sun; and standing on the quay, where the ground I stood on seemed to send forth light, and the shadows had an azure glory as of spirits become visible, I felt myself in the flood of a glorious life, wherein my own small year-counted existence seemed to melt, so that I knew it not; and a great sob arose within me as at the rush of waters that were too strong a bliss. So I stood there awaiting my companion; and I saw him not till he said: ‘Ezra, I have been to the post and there is your letter.’


Ezra!


Ezra. I was expecting a letter; for I wrote continually to my mother. And that sound of my name was like the touch of a wand that recalled me to the body wherefrom I had been released as it were to mingle with the ocean of human existence, free from the pressure of individual bondage. I opened the letter; and the name came again as a cry that would have disturbed me in the bosom of heaven, and made me yearn to reach where that sorrow was—‘Ezra, my son!’ She was a mother of whom it might have come—yea, might have come to be said, ‘Her children arise up and call her blessed.’ In her I understood the meaning of that Master who, 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.’ 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. But I worked. We were destitute—every thing 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? 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?


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 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.


Let us go now. I cannot talk any longer.


She disguises it under an air of taking everything as a matter of course. A stranger might suppose that she had condescended rather than risen. I always noticed that doubleness in her.


We can’t be having those people always. Gascoigne talks too much. Country clergy are always bores—with their confounded fuss about everything.


It would not be so nice for you as being near the rectory here, mamma. We shall perhaps be very little at Ryelands. You would miss my aunt and uncle.


Mr. Grandcourt is gone out, so I determined to fill up the time by coming to you, mamma. That is a punishment to you for not wearing better lace on your head. You didn’t think I should come and detect you—you dreadfully careless-about-yourself mamma!


Scold me, dear. But I wish there was something you could eat after your ride—instead of these scraps. Let Jocosa make you a cup of chocolate in your old way. You used to like that.


Oh, no, a piece of bread, or one of those hard biscuits. I can’t think about eating. I am come to say good-bye.


What! going to Ryelands again?


No, we are going to town,


It is rather early to go to town, and Mr. Grandcourt not in Parliament.


Oh, there is only one more day’s hunting to be had, and Henleigh has some business in town with lawyers, I think. I am very glad. I shall like to go to town.


You will see your house in Grosvenor Square,


Yes. And there is so much to be seen and done in town.


I wish, my dear Gwendolen, that you would use your influence with Mr. Grandcourt to induce him to enter Parliament. A man of his position should make his weight felt in politics. The best judges are confident that the ministry will have to appeal to the country on this question of further Reform, and Mr. Grandcourt should be ready for the opportunity. I am not quite sure that his opinions and mine accord entirely; I have not heard him express himself very fully. But I don’t look at the matter from that point of view. I am thinking of your husband’s standing in the country. And he has now come to that stage of life when a man like him should enter into public affairs. A wife has great influence with her husband. Use yours in that direction, my dear.


I should be very glad, uncle. But I think Mr. Grandcourt would not like the trouble of an election—at least, unless it could be without his making speeches. I thought candidates always made speeches.


Not necessarily—to any great extent. A man of position and weight can get on without much of it. A county member need have very little trouble in that way, and both out of the House and in it is liked the better for not being a speechifier. Tell Mr. Grandcourt that I say so.


Here comes Jocosa with my chocolate after all,


Your uncle and Anna will very likely be in town about Easter. Dear Rex hopes to come out with honors and a fellowship, and he wants his father and Anna to meet him in London, that they may be jolly together, as he says. I shouldn’t wonder if Lord Brackenshaw invited them, he has been so very kind since he came back to the Castle.


I hope my uncle will bring Ann to stay in Grosvenor Square. I am very glad of Rex’s good fortune.


We must not be premature, and rejoice too much beforehand. Not but that I am in correspondence with impartial judges, who have the highest hopes about my son, as a singularly clear-headed young man. And of his excellent disposition and principle I have had the best evidence.


We shall have him a great lawyer some time,


How very nice!


Talking of Lord Brackenshaw’s kindness, you don’t know how delightful he has been, Gwendolen. He has begged me to consider myself his guest in this house till I can get another that I like—he did it in the most graceful way. But now a house has turned up. Old Mr. Jodson is dead, and we can have his house. It is just what I want; small, but with nothing hideous to make you miserable thinking about it. And it is only a mile from the Rectory. You remember the low white house nearly hidden by the trees, as we turn up the lane to the church?


Yes, but you have no furniture, poor mamma,


Oh, I am saving money for that. You know who has made me rather rich, dear. And Jocosa really makes so little do for housekeeping—it is quite wonderful.


Oh, please let me go up-stairs with you and arrange my hat, mamma. I suppose I shall never see all this again,


You are not well, dear?


No; that chocolate has made me sick,


I should be allowed to come to you if you were ill, darling,


Oh, yes. But you know I never am ill. I am as strong as possible; and you must not take to fretting about me, but make yourself as happy as you can with the girls. They are better children to you than I have been, you know.


You have always been good, my darling. I remember nothing else.


Why, what did I ever do that was good to you, except marry Mr. Grandcourt? And I should not have done that unless it had pleased myself.


God forbid, child! I would not have had you marry for my sake. Your happiness by itself is half mine.


Very well, then you will please to consider that you are half happy, which is more than I am used to seeing you. Now I am ready; but oh, mamma, Mr. Grandcourt gives me a quantity of money, and expects me to spend it, and I can’t spend it; and you know I can’t bear charity children and all that; and here are thirty pounds. I wish the girls would spend it for me on little things for themselves when you go to the new house. Tell them so.


God bless you, dear. It will please them so that you should have thought of them in particular.


Oh, they are troublesome things; but they don’t trouble me now. I think I am making a very good Mrs. Grandcourt.


Well, your Jewess is pretty—there’s no denying that. But where is her Jewish impudence? She looks as demure as a nun. I suppose she learned that on the stage.


I thought you could admire no style of woman but your Berenice.


That is the style I worship—not admire. Other styles of women I might make myself wicked for, but for Berenice I could make myself—well, pretty good, which is something much more difficult.


Hush,


Good, good—the crescendo better than before.


You must let me say how much I am obliged to you. I had heard from Mr. Deronda that I should have a great treat in your singing, but I was too ignorant to imagine how great.


You are very good to say so,


We shall all want to learn of you—I, at least. I sing very badly, as Herr Klesmer will tell you, but I have been rebuked for not liking to be middling, since I can be nothing more. I think that is a different doctrine from yours?


Not if it means that it would be worth while for you to study further, and for Miss Lapidoth to have the pleasure of helping you.


If you think I could teach you, I shall be very glad. I am anxious to teach, but I have only just begun. If I do it well, it must be by remembering how my master taught me.


You have not been long in London, I think?—but you were perhaps introduced to Mr. Deronda abroad?


No. I never saw him before I came to England in the summer.


But he has seen you often and heard you sing a great deal, has he not? He spoke of you to me with the highest praise. He seemed to know you quite well.


Oh, I was poor and needed help, and Mr. Deronda has given me the best friends in the world. That is the only way he came to know anything about me—because he was sorry for me. I had no friends when I came. I was in distress. I owe everything to him.


Miss Lapidoth is everything you described her to be.


You have been very quick in discovering that,


I have not found out all the excellencies you spoke of—I don’t mean that, but I think her singing is charming, and herself, too. Her face is lovely—not in the least common; and she is such a complete little person. I should think she will be a great success.


You despise me for talking artificially.


No. I think that is quite excusable sometimes. But I did not think what you were last saying was altogether artificial.


There was something in it that displeased you. What was it?


It is impossible to explain such things. One can never communicate niceties of feeling about words and manner.


You think I am shut out from understanding them. Have I shown myself so very dense to everything you have said?


Not at all. But experience differs for different people. We don’t all wince at the same things. I have had plenty of proof that you are not dense.


But one may feel things and are not able to do anything better for all that. I begin to think we can only get better by having people about us who raise good feelings. You must not be surprised at anything in me. I think it is too late for me to alter. I don’t know how to set about being wise, as you told me to be.


I seldom find I do any good by my preaching. I might as well have kept from meddling,


Don’t say that. If you despair of me, I shall despair. Your saying that I should not go on being selfish and ignorant has been some strength to me. If you say you wish you had not meddled—that means you despair of me and forsake me. And then you will decide for me that I shall not be good. It is you who will decide; because you might have made me different by keeping as near to me as you could, and believing in me.


Per pietà non dirmi addio.


What an enviable fellow you are, sitting on a sofa with that young duchess, and having an interesting quarrel with her!


Quarrel with her?


Oh, about theology, of course; nothing personal. But she told you what you ought to think, and then left you with a grand air which was admirable. Is she an Antinomian—if so, tell her I am an Antinomian painter, and introduce me. I should like to paint her and her husband. He has the sort of handsome physique that the Duke ought to have in Lucrezia Borgia—if it could go with a fine baritone, which it can’t.


Lush will dine with us among the other people to-morrow. You will treat him civilly.


I thought you did not intend him to frequent the house again.


I want him just now. He is useful to me; and he must be treated civilly.


I am as glad as you are that the pawnbroker is not her brother: there are Ezras and Ezras in the world; and really it is a comfort to think that all Jews are not like those shopkeepers who will not let you get out of their shops: and besides, what he said to you about his mother and sister makes me bless him. I am sure he’s good. But I never did like anything fanatical. I suppose I heard a little too much preaching in my youth and lost my palate for it.


I don’t think you will find that Mordecai obtrudes any preaching. He is not what I should call fanatical. I call a man fanatical when his enthusiasm is narrow and hoodwinked, so that he has no sense of proportions, and becomes unjust and unsympathetic to men who are out of his own track. Mordecai is an enthusiast; I should like to keep that word for the highest order of minds—those who care supremely for grand and general benefits to mankind. He is not a strictly orthodox Jew, and is full of allowances for others; his conformity in many things is an allowance for the condition of other Jews. The people he lives with are as fond of him as possible, and they can’t in the least understand his ideas.


Oh, well, I can live up to the level of the pawnbroker’s mother, and like him for what I see to be good in him; and for what I don’t see the merits of I will take your word. According to your definition, I suppose one might be fanatical in worshipping common-sense; for my poor husband used to say the world would be a poor place if there were nothing but common-sense in it. However, Mirah’s brother will have good bedding—that I have taken care of; and I shall have this extra window pasted up with paper to prevent draughts. It is a comfort to think that the people of the house are no strangers to me—no hypocritical harpies. And when the children know, we shall be able to make the rooms much prettier.


The next stage of the affair is to tell all to Mordecai, and get him to move—which may be a more difficult business,


And will you tell Mirah before I say anything to the children? No, I think not. Let me tell Hans and the girls the evening before, and they will be away the next morning?


Yes, that will be best. But do justice to my account of Mordecai—or Ezra, as I suppose Mirah will wish to call him: don’t assist their imagination by referring to Habakkuk Mucklewrath,


Trust me, trust me. I shall have to persuade them so hard to be glad, that I shall convert myself. When I am frightened I find it a good thing to have somebody to be angry with for not being brave: it warms the blood.


I suppose Mordecai is at home and expecting me,


What do you want to talk to Mordecai about?


Something that is very interesting to him, but that you can’t understand.


Can you say this?


No, really. I can’t say anything like it.


I thought not. Mordecai, here’s the young swell


You are coming to tell me something that my soul longs for.


It is true I have something very weighty to tell you—something I trust that you will rejoice in,


It is all revealed—it is made clear to you. You are even as my brother that sucked the breasts of my mother—the heritage is yours—there is no doubt to divide us.


I have learned nothing new about myself. Except, except that I had really some time ago come into another sort of hidden connection with you, besides what you have spoken of as existing in your own feeling. I had made the acquaintance of one in whom you are interested. One who is closely related to your departed mother, whom she and you held dear above all others. What was prayed for has come to pass: Mirah has been delivered from evil. Your sister is worthy of the mother you honored.


It was in search of them, that I turned into this house: the name Ezra Cohen was just then the most interesting name in the world to me. I confess I had fear for a long while. Perhaps you will forgive me now for having asked you that question about the elder Mrs. Cohen’s daughter. I cared very much what I should find Mirah’s friends to be. But I had found a brother worthy of her when I knew that her Ezra was disguised under the name of Mordecai.


Mordecai is really my name—Ezra Mordecai Cohen.


Is there any kinship between this family and yours?


Only the kinship of Israel. My soul clings to these people, who have sheltered me and given me succor out of the affection that abides in Jewish hearts, as sweet odor in things long crushed and hidden from the outer air. It is good for me to bear with their ignorance and be bound to them in gratitude, that I may keep in mind the spiritual poverty of the Jewish million, and not put impatient knowledge in the stead of loving wisdom.


But you don’t feel bound to continue with them now there is a closer tie to draw you? It seems to me right now—is it not?—that you should live with your sister; and I have prepared a home to take you to in the neighborhood of her friends, that she may join you there. Pray grant me this wish. It will enable me to be with you often in the hours when Mirah is obliged to leave you. That is my selfish reason. But the chief reason is, that Mirah will desire to watch over you, and that you ought to give her the guardianship of a brother’s presence. You shall have books about you. I shall want to learn of you, and to take you out to see the river and trees. And you will have the rest and comfort that you will be more and more in need of—nay, that I need for you. This is the claim I make on you, now that we have found each other.


And you would have me hold it doubtful whether you were born a Jew! Have we not from the first touched each other with invisible fibres—have we not quivered together like the leaves from a common stem with stirring from a common root? I know what I am outwardly, I am one among the crowd of poor—I am stricken, I am dying. But our souls know each other. They gazed in silence as those who have long been parted and meet again, but when they found voice they were assured, and all their speech is understanding. The life of Israel is in your veins. What you wish of me I will do. And our mother—may the blessing of the Eternal be with her in our souls!—would have wished it too. I will accept what your loving kindness has prepared, and Mirah’s home shall be mine. But I shall grieve to part from these parents and the little ones. You must tell them, for my heart would fail me.


I felt that you would want me to tell them. Shall we go now at once?


Yes; let us not defer it. It must be done. But do not dwell on my sister more than is needful. Ask your father to come, and tell Sarah to mind the shop. My friend has something to say,


Well, sir! I’m glad you’re doing us the honor to join our family party again. We are pretty comfortable, I think.


I have just been telling Mordecai of an event that makes a great change in his life, but I hope you will agree with me that it is a joyful one. Since he thinks of you as his best friends, he wishes me to tell you for him at once.


Relations with money, sir?


No; not exactly. But a very precious relation wishes to be reunited to him—a very good and lovely young sister, who will care for his comfort in every way.


Married, sir?


No, not married.


But with a maintenance?


With talents which will secure her a maintenance. A home is already provided for Mordecai.


Well, well! and so you’re going away from us, Mordecai.


And where there’s no children as there is here,


No Jacob, and no Adelaide, and no Eugenie!


Ay, ay, Jacob’s learning ’ill all wear out of him. He must go to school. It’ll be hard times for Jacob,


Never mind, old man; you shall go to the riders. It’s not as we’re the people to grudge anybody’s good luck, sir, or the portion of their cup being made fuller, as I may say. I’m not an envious man, and if anybody offered to set up Mordecai in a shop of my sort two doors lower down, I shouldn’t make wry faces about it. I’m not one of them that had need have a poor opinion of themselves, and be frightened at anybody else getting a chance. If I’m offal, let a wise man come and tell me, for I’ve never heard it yet. And in point of business, I’m not a class of goods to be in danger. If anybody takes to rolling me, I can pack myself up like a caterpillar, and find my feet when I’m let alone. And though, as I may say, you’re taking some of our good works from us, which is property bearing interest, I’m not saying but we can afford that, though my mother and my wife had the good will to wish and do for Mordecai to the last; and a Jew must not be like a servant who works for reward—though I see nothing against a reward if I can get it. And as to the extra outlay in schooling, I’m neither poor nor greedy—I wouldn’t hang myself for sixpence, nor half a crown neither. But the truth of it is, the women and children are fond of Mordecai. You may partly see how it is, sir, by your own sense. A Jewish man is bound to thank God, day by day, that he was not made a woman; but a woman has to thank God that He has made her according to His will. And we all know what He has made her—a child-bearing, tender-hearted thing is the woman of our people. Her children are mostly stout, as I think you’ll say Addy’s are, and she’s not mushy, but her heart is tender. So you must excuse present company, sir, for not being glad all at once. And as to this young lady—for by what you say ‘young lady’ is the proper term we shall all be glad for Mordecai’s sake by-and-by, when we cast up our accounts and see where we are.


Friends, friends! For food and raiment and shelter I would not have sought better than you have given me. You have sweetened the morsel with love; and what I thought of as a joy that would be left to me even in the last months of my waning strength was to go on teaching the lad. But now I am as one who had clad himself beforehand in his shroud, and used himself to making the grave his bed, when the divine command sounded in his ears, ‘Arise, and go forth; the night is not yet come.’ For no light matter would I have turned away from your kindness to take another’s. But it has been taught us, as you know, that the reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another—so said Ben Azai. You have made your duty to one of the poor among your brethren a joy to you and me; and your reward shall be that you will not rest without the joy of like deeds in the time to come. And may not Jacob come and visit me?


Surely that can be managed. It is no further than Brompton.


Well. I hope there’ll be nothing in the way of your getting kosher meat, Mordecai. For you’ll have to trust to those you live with.


That’s all right, that’s all right, you may be sure, mother. So, sir, it was better than learning you had to talk to Mordecai about! I wondered to myself at the time. I thought somehow there was a something.


Mordecai will perhaps explain to you how it was that I was seeking him,


Mirah would wish to thank the Cohens for their goodness. You would wish her to do so—to come and see them, would you not?


I cannot tell. I fear not. There is a family sorrow, and the sight of my sister might be to them as the fresh bleeding of wounds. There is a daughter and sister who will never be restored as Mirah is. But who knows the pathways? We are all of us denying or fulfilling prayers—and men in their careless deeds walk amidst invisible outstretched arms and pleadings made in vain. In my ears I have the prayers of generations past and to come. My life is as nothing to me but the beginning of fulfilment. And yet I am only another prayer—which you will fulfil.


Now, Kate, put out your candle, and all come round the fire cosily. Hans, dear, do leave off laughing at those poems for the ninety-ninth time, and come too. I have something wonderful to tell.


As if I didn’t know that, ma. I have seen it in the corner of your eye ever so long, and in your pretense of errands,


Well, then, if you are so wise, perhaps you know that Mirah’s brother is found!


Oh, confound it!


Hans, that is wicked. Suppose we had lost you?


I cannot help being rather sorry. And her mother?—where is she?


Her mother is dead.


I hope the brother is not a bad man,


Nor a fellow all smiles and jewelry—a Crystal Palace Assyrian with a hat on,


Were there ever such unfeeling children? You don’t think the least bit of Mirah’s joy in the matter.


You know, ma, Mirah hardly remembers her brother,


People who are lost for twelve years should never come back again. They are always in the way.


Hans! If you had lost me for twenty years, I should have thought—


I said twelve years. Anywhere about twelve years is the time at which lost relations should keep out of the way.


Well, but it’s nice finding people—there is something to tell. Did Prince Camaralzaman find him?


Mr. Deronda has the highest admiration for him, seems quite to look up to him. And he says Mirah is just the sister to understand this brother.


Deronda is getting perfectly preposterous about those Jews. He wants to do everything he can to encourage Mirah in her prejudices.


Oh, for shame, Hans!—to speak in that way of Mr. Deronda,


And now we shall never be all together, but we must have this prophet Elijah to tea with us, and Mirah will think of nothing but sitting on the ruins of Jerusalem. She will be spoiled as an artist—mind that—she will get as narrow as a nun. Everything will be spoiled—our home and everything. I shall take to drinking.


Oh, really, Hans. I do think men are the most contemptible animals in all creation. Every one of them must have everything to his mind, else he is unbearable.


Oh, oh, oh, it’s very dreadful! I feel as if ancient Nineveh were come again.


I should like to know what is the good of having gone to the university and knowing everything, if you are so childish, Hans. You ought to put up with a man that Providence sends you to be kind to. We shall have to put up with him.


I hope you will all of you like the new Lamentations of Jeremiah—‘to be continued in our next’—that’s all. It’s no use being one thing more than another if one has to endure the company of those men with a fixed idea, staring blankly at you, and requiring all your remarks to be small foot-notes to their text. If you’re to be under a petrifying wall, you’d better be an old boot. I don’t feel myself an old boot. Good night, little mother. Good-night, girls.


Suppose Mirah knew how you are behaving. I should like to see Mirah when Mr. Deronda tells her. I know she will look so beautiful.


I must keep my old garments by me for a remembrance.


You like to go in that dress, dear?


My brother is poor, and I want to look as much like him as I can, else he may feel distant from me


Ezra,


That was our mother’s voice. You remember her calling me?


Yes, and how you answered her—‘Mother!’—and I knew you loved her.


Ah, the dear head, the dear head!


You are very ill, Ezra,


Yes, dear child, I shall not be long with you in the body,


Oh, I will love you and we will talk to each other. I will tell you everything, and you will teach me:—you will teach me to be a good Jewess—what she would have liked me to be. I shall always be with you when I am not working. For I work now. I shall get money to keep us. Oh, I have had such good friends. See this dear lady! I was a stranger, a poor wanderer, and she believed in me, and has treated me as a daughter. Please give my brother your hand,


The Eternal Goodness has been with you. You have helped to fulfill our mother’s prayer.


I think we will go now, shall we?—and return later,


Nothing makes a woman more of a gawky than looking out after people and showing tempers in public. A woman ought to have good manners. Else it’s intolerable to appear with her.


I think of making myself accomplished while we are in town, and having singing lessons.


Why?


Why? because I can’t eat pâté de foie gras to make me sleepy, and I can’t smoke, and I can’t go to the club to make me like to come away again—I want a variety of ennui. What would be the most convenient time, when you are busy with your lawyers and people, for me to have lessons from that little Jewess, whose singing is getting all the rage.


Whenever you like. I don’t see why a lady should sing. Amateurs make fools of themselves. A lady can’t risk herself in that way in company. And one doesn’t want to hear squalling in private.


I like frankness: that seems to me a husband’s great charm. But; I suppose you don’t object to Miss Lapidoth’s singing at our party on the fourth? I thought of engaging her. Lady Brackenshaw had her, you know: and the Raymonds, who are very particular about their music. And Mr. Deronda, who is a musician himself and a first-rate judge, says there is no singing in such good taste as hers for a drawing-room. I think his opinion is an authority.


It’s very indecent of Deronda to go about praising that girl,


Indecent!


Yes; and especially when she is patronized by Lady Mallinger. He ought to hold his tongue about her. Men can see what is his relation to her.


Men who judge of others by themselves,


Of course. And a woman should take their judgment—else she is likely to run her head into the wrong place. I suppose you take Deronda for a saint.


Oh dear no! Only a little less of a monster.


It is not true! What does it matter whether he believes it or not?


Perhaps you wonder to see me—perhaps I ought to have written—but I wished to make a particular request.


I am glad to see you instead of having a letter,


I thought, at least I hoped, you would not object to sing at our house on the 4th—in the evening—at a party like Lady Brackenshaw’s. I should be so much obliged.


I shall be very happy to sing for you. At ten?


At ten, please. Mr. Deronda is in the next room.


Yes. He is reading Hebrew with my brother.


You have a brother?


Yes, a dear brother who is ill—consumptive, and Mr. Deronda is the best of friends to him, as he has been to me,


Tell me, tell me—tell me the truth. You are sure he is quite good. You know no evil of him. Any evil that people say of him is false.


Who are the people that say evil of him? I would not believe any evil of him, if an angel came to tell it me. He found me when I was so miserable—I was going to drown myself; I looked so poor and forsaken; you would have thought I was a beggar by the wayside. And he treated me as if I had been a king’s daughter. He took me to the best of women. He found my brother for me. And he honors my brother—though he too was poor—oh, almost as poor as he could be. And my brother honors him. That is no light thing to say for my brother is very learned and great-minded. And Mr. Deronda says there are few men equal to him.


Thank you, thank you. I must go, I shall see you—on the fourth—I am so much obliged


May I ask where you have been at this extraordinary hour?


Oh, yes; I have been to Miss Lapidoth’s, to ask her to come and sing for us,


And to ask her about her relations with Deronda?


Yes Yes; and what you said is false—a low, wicked falsehood.


She told you so—did she?


It’s of no consequence so far as her singing goes. You can have her to sing, if you like. But you will please to observe that you are not to go near that house again. As my wife, you must take my word about what is proper for you. When you undertook to be Mrs. Grandcourt, you undertook not to make a fool of yourself. You have been making a fool of yourself this morning; and if you were to go on as you have begun, you might soon get yourself talked of at the clubs in a way you would not like. What do you know about the world? You have married me, and must be guided by my opinion.


A—Gwendolen, there’s some business about property to be explained. I have told Lush to come and explain it to you. He knows all about these things. I am going out. He can come up now. He’s the only person who can explain. I suppose you’ll not mind.


You know that I do mind. I shall not see him.


It’s no use making a fuss. There are plenty of brutes in the world that one has to talk to. People with any savoir vivre don’t make a fuss about such things. Some business must be done. You can’t expect agreeable people to do it. If I employ Lush, the proper thing for you is to take it as a matter of course. Not to make a fuss about it. Not to toss your head and bite your lips about people of that sort.


I have arranged for Lush to come up now, while I am out. Shall I tell him he may come? I shall come back in time to ride, if you like to get ready,


Don’t make yourself more disagreeable than nature obliges you.


I will write a brief abstract for Mrs. Grandcourt to read.


I need hardly say that I should not have presented myself if Mr. Grandcourt had not expressed a strong wish to that effect—as no doubt he has mentioned to you.


My having been in Mr. Grandcourt’s confidence for fifteen years or more—since he was a youth, in fact—of course gives me a peculiar position. He can speak to me of affairs that he could not mention to any one else; and, in fact, he could not have employed any one else in this affair. I have accepted the task out of friendship for him. Which is my apology for accepting the task—if you would have preferred some one else. This paper contains some information about Mr. Grandcourt’s will, an abstract of a part he wished you to know—if you’ll be good enough to cast your eyes over it. But there is something I had to say by way of introduction—which I hope you’ll pardon me for, if it’s not quite agreeable.


Say what you have to say without apologizing, please,


I have only to remind you of something that occurred before your engagement to Mr. Grandcourt. You met a lady in Cardell Chase, if you remember, who spoke to you of her position with regard to Mr. Grandcourt. She had children with her—one a very fine boy. Mr. Grandcourt was aware that you were acquainted with this unfortunate affair beforehand, and he thinks it only right that his position and intentions should be made quite clear to you. It is an affair of property and prospects; and if there were any objection you had to make, if you would mention it to me—it is a subject which of course he would rather not speak about himself—if you will be good enough just to read this.


Lay it on the table. And go into the next room, please.


My lady winces considerably. She didn’t know what would be the charge for that superfine article, Henleigh Grandcourt.


Tell Mr. Grandcourt that his arrangements are just what I desired


I will insist on being separated from him I will leave him whether he consents or not. If this boy becomes his heir, I have made an atonement.


If I am to have misery anyhow. I had better have the misery that I can keep to myself.


You might at least have raised your hat to her,


I wish you would come and see me to-morrow between five and six, Mr. Deronda.


Certainly,


How do you do?


You will wonder why I begged you to come. I wanted to ask you something. You said I was ignorant. That is true. And what can I do but ask you?


My only regret is, that I can be of so little use to you.


I wanted to tell you that I have always been thinking of your advice, but is it any use?—I can’t make myself different, because things about me raise bad feelings—and I must go on—I can alter nothing—it is no use. But if I go on I shall get worse. I want not to get worse. I should like to be what you wish. There are people who are good and enjoy great things—I know there are. I am a contemptible creature. I feel as if I should get wicked with hating people. I have tried to think that I would go away from everybody. But I can’t. There are so many things to hinder me. You think, perhaps, that I don’t mind. But I do mind. I am afraid of everything. I am afraid of getting wicked. Tell me what I can do.


I will not stay longer now. Good-bye.


I am going yachting to the Mediterranean.


When?


The day after to-morrow. The yacht is at Marseilles. Lush is gone to get everything ready.


Shall I have mamma to stay with me, then?


No; you will go with me.


It is nothing to grieve you, sir?


No, Dan, no. Sit down. I have something to say. Not to grieve me, my boy, no. At least, if there is nothing in it that will grieve you too much. But I hardly expected that this—just this—would ever happen. There have been reasons why I have never prepared you for it. There have been reasons why I have never told you anything about your parentage. But I have striven in every way not to make that an injury to you. I have acted in obedience to your mother’s wishes. The secrecy was her wish. But now she desires to remove it. She desires to see you. I will put this letter into your hands, which you can look at by-and-by. It will merely tell you what she wishes you to do, and where you will find her.


Is my father also living?


No. Perhaps I was wrong, Dan, to undertake what I did. And perhaps I liked it a little too well—having you all to myself. But if you have had any pain which I might have helped, I ask you to forgive me.


The forgiveness has long been there. The chief pain has always been on account of some one else—whom I never knew—whom I am now to know. It has not hindered me from feeling an affection for you which has made a large part of all the life I remember.


My good friend and yours, Sir Hugo Mallinger, will have told you that I wish to see you. My health is shaken, and I desire there should be no time lost before I deliver to you what I have long withheld. Let nothing hinder you from being at the Albergo dell’ Italia in Genoa by the fourteenth of this month. Wait for me there. I am uncertain when I shall be able to make the journey from Spezia, where I shall be staying. That will depend on several things. Wait for me—the Princess Halm-Eberstein. Bring with you the diamond ring that Sir Hugo gave you. I shall like to see it again.


I will ask to have the child Jacob to stay with me,


I will drive round and ask Mrs. Cohen to let him come,


The grandmother will deny you nothing. I’m glad you were a little wrong as well as I. You thought that old Mrs. Cohen would not bear to see Mirah.


I undervalued her heart. She is capable of rejoicing that another’s plant blooms though her own be withered.


Oh, they are dear good people; I feel as if we all belonged to each other,


What should you have felt if that Ezra had been your brother?


He is not a bad man—I think he would never forsake any one.


God bless you, Dan! Whatever else changes for you, it can’t change my being the oldest friend you have known, and the one who has all along felt the most for you. I couldn’t have loved you better if you’d been my own—only I should have been better pleased with thinking of you always as the future master of the Abbey instead of my fine nephew; and then you would have seen it necessary for you to take a political line. However—things must be as they may.


You are a beautiful creature! I knew you would be. I am your mother. But you can have no love for me.


I have thought of you more than of any other being in the world,


I am not like what you thought I was,


I used to think that you might be suffering. I used to wish that I could be a comfort to you.


I am suffering. But with a suffering that you can’t comfort. Sit down. I am not suffering at this moment. I am at ease now. I am able to talk. No. I did not send for you to comfort me. I could not know beforehand—I don’t know now—what you will feel toward me. I have not the foolish notion that you can love me merely because I am your mother, when you have never seen or heard of me in all your life. But I thought I chose something better for you than being with me. I did not think I deprived you of anything worth having.


You cannot wish me to believe that your affection would not have been worth having,


I don’t mean to speak ill of myself. But I had not much affection to give you. I did not want affection. I had been stifled with it. I wanted to live out the life that was in me, and not to be hampered with other lives. You wonder what I was. I was no princess then. No princess in this tame life that I live in now. I was a great singer, and I acted as well as I sang. All the rest were poor beside me. Men followed me from one country to another. I was living a myriad lives in one. I did not want a child.


I did not want to marry. I was forced into marrying your father—forced, I mean, by my father’s wishes and commands; and besides, it was my best way of getting some freedom. I could rule my husband, but not my father. I had a right to be free. I had a right to seek my freedom from a bondage that I hated. And the bondage I hated for myself I wanted to keep you from. What better could the most loving mother have done? I relieved you from the bondage of having been born a Jew.


Then I am a Jew? My father was a Jew, and you are a Jewess?


Yes, your father was my cousin,


I am glad of it,


Why do you say you are glad? You are an English gentleman. I secured you that.


You did not know what you secured me. How could you choose my birthright for me?


I chose for you what I would have chosen for myself. How could I know that you would have the spirit of my father in you? How could I know that you would love what I hated?—if you really love to be a Jew.


Forgive me, if I speak hastily. Why have you resolved now on disclosing to me what you took care to have me brought up in ignorance of? Why—since you seem angry that I should be glad?


Oh—the reasons of our actions! When you are as old as I am, it will not seem so simple a question—‘Why did you do this?’ People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel—or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others. When you reproach me in your heart for sending you away from me, you mean that I ought to say I felt about you as other women say they feel about their children. I did not feel that. I was glad to be freed from you. But I did well for you, and I gave you your father’s fortune. Do I seem now to be revoking everything?—Well, there are reasons. I feel many things that I cannot understand. A fatal illness has been growing in me for a year. I shall very likely not live another year. I will not deny anything I have done. I will not pretend to love where I have no love. But shadows are rising round me. Sickness makes them. If I have wronged the dead—I have but little time to do what I left undone.


Sir Hugo has written much about you. He tells me you have a wonderful mind—you comprehend everything—you are wiser than he is with all his sixty years. You say you are glad to know that you were born a Jew. I am not going to tell you that I have changed my mind about that. Your feelings are against mine. You don’t thank me for what I did. Shall you comprehend your mother, or only blame her?


There is not a fibre within me but makes me wish to comprehend her. It is a bitter reversal of my longing to think of blaming her. What I have been most trying to do for fifteen years is to have some understanding of those who differ from myself.


Then you have become unlike your grandfather in that. though you are a young copy of him in your face. He never comprehended me, or if he did, he only thought of fettering me into obedience. I was to be what he called ‘the Jewish woman’ under pain of his curse. I was to feel everything I did not feel, and believe everything I did not believe. I was to feel awe for the bit of parchment in the mezuza over the door; to dread lest a bit of butter should touch a bit of meat; to think it beautiful that men should bind the tephillin on them, and women not,—to adore the wisdom of such laws, however silly they might seem to me. I was to love the long prayers in the ugly synagogue, and the howling, and the gabbling, and the dreadful fasts, and the tiresome feasts, and my father’s endless discoursing about our people, which was a thunder without meaning in my ears. I was to care forever about what Israel had been; and I did not care at all. I cared for the wide world, and all that I could represent in it. I hated living under the shadow of my father’s strictness. Teaching, teaching for everlasting—‘this you must be,’ ‘that you must not be’—pressed on me like a frame that got tighter and tighter as I grew. I wanted to live a large life, with freedom to do what every one else did, and be carried along in a great current, not obliged to care. Ah! you are glad to have been born a Jew. You say so. That is because you have not been brought up as a Jew. That separateness seems sweet to you because I saved you from it.


When you resolved on that, you meant that I should never know my origin? You have at least changed in your feeling on that point.


Yes, that was what I meant. That is what I persevered in. And it is not true to say that I have changed. Things have changed in spite of me. I am still the same Leonora— here within me is the same desire, the same will, the same choice, but events come upon us like evil enchantments: and thoughts, feelings, apparitions in the darkness are events—are they not? I don’t consent. We only consent to what we love. I obey something tyrannic— I am forced to be withered, to feel pain, to be dying slowly. Do I love that? Well, I have been forced to obey my dead father. I have been forced to tell you that you are a Jew, and deliver to you what he commanded me to deliver.


I beseech you to tell me what moved you—when you were young, I mean—to take the course you did. I gather that my grandfather opposed your bent to be an artist. Though my own experience has been quite different, I enter into the painfulness of your struggle. I can imagine the hardship of an enforced renunciation.


No. You are not a woman. You may try—but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out—‘this is the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.’ That was what my father wanted. He wished I had been a son; he cared for me as a make-shift link. His heart was set on his Judaism. He hated that Jewish women should be thought of by the Christian world as a sort of ware to make public singers and actresses of. As if we were not the more enviable for that! That is a chance of escaping from bondage.


Was my grandfather a learned man?


Oh, yes,—and a clever physician—and good: I don’t deny that he was good. A man to be admired in a play—grand, with an iron will. Like the old Foscari before he pardons. But such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but not ruling the world, they throw all the weight of their will on the necks and souls of women. But nature sometimes thwarts them. My father had no other child than his daughter, and she was like himself. Your father was different. Unlike me—all lovingness and affection. I knew I could rule him; and I made him secretly promise me, before I married him, that he would put no hindrance in the way of my being an artist. My father was on his deathbed when we were married: from the first he had fixed his mind on my marrying my cousin Ephraim. And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment. I meant to have my will in the end, but I could only have it by seeming to obey. I had an awe of my father—always I had had an awe of him: it was impossible to help it. I hated to feel awed—I wished I could have defied him openly; but I never could. It was what I could not imagine: I could not act it to myself that I should begin to defy my father openly and succeed. And I never would risk failure.


Where was my grandfather’s home?


Here in Genoa, where I was married; and his family had lived here generations ago. But my father had been in various countries.


You must surely have lived in England?


My mother was English—a Jewess of Portuguese descent. My father married her in England. Certain circumstances of that marriage made all the difference in my life: through that marriage my father thwarted his own plans. My mother’s sister was a singer, and afterward she married the English partner of a merchant’s house here in Genoa, and they came and lived here eleven years. My mother died when I was eight years old, and my father allowed me to be continually with my Aunt Leonora and be taught under her eyes, as if he had not minded the danger of her encouraging my wish to be a singer, as she had been. But this was it—I saw it again and again in my father:—he did not guard against consequences, because he felt sure he could hinder them if he liked. Before my aunt left Genoa, I had had enough teaching to bring out the born singer and actress within me: my father did not know everything that was done; but he knew that I was taught music and singing—he knew my inclination. That was nothing to him: he meant that I should obey his will. And he was resolved that I should marry my cousin Ephraim, the only one left of my father’s family that he knew. I wanted not to marry. I thought of all plans to resist it, but at last I found that I could rule my cousin, and I consented. My father died three weeks after we were married, and then I had my way! It has not lasted, though. My father is getting his way now.


You are like him—but milder—there is something of your own father in you; and he made it the labor of his life to devote himself to me: wound up his money-changing and banking, and lived to wait upon me—he went against his conscience for me. As I loved the life of my art, so he loved me. Let me look at your hand again: the hand with the ring on. It was your father’s ring.


Mother! take us all into your heart—the living and the dead. Forgive every thing that hurts you in the past. Take my affection.


I reject nothing, but I have nothing to give,


It is better so. We must part again soon and you owe me no duties. I did not wish you to be born. I parted with you willingly. When your father died I resolved that I would have no more ties, but such as I could free myself from. I was the Alcharisi you have heard of: the name had magic wherever it was carried. Men courted me. Sir Hugo Mallinger was one who wished to marry me. He was madly in love with me. One day I asked him, ‘Is there a man capable of doing something for love of me, and expecting nothing in return?’ He said: ‘What is it you want done?’ I said, ‘Take my boy and bring him up as an Englishman, and never let him know anything about his parents.’ You were little more than two years old, and were sitting on his foot. He declared that he would pay money to have such a boy. I had not meditated much on the plan beforehand, but as soon as I had spoken about it, it took possession of me as something I could not rest without doing. At first he thought I was not serious, but I convinced him, and he was never surprised at anything. He agreed that it would be for your good, and the finest thing for you. A great singer and actress is a queen, but she gives no royalty to her son. All that happened at Naples. And afterward I made Sir Hugo the trustee of your fortune. That is what I did; and I had a joy in doing it. My father had tyrannized over me—he cared more about a grandson to come than he did about me: I counted as nothing. You were to be such a Jew as he; you were to be what he wanted. But you were my son, and it was my turn to say what you should be. I said you should not know you were a Jew.


Is there a man capable of doing something for love of me, and expecting nothing in return?


What is it you want done?


Take my boy and bring him up as an Englishman, and never let him know anything about his parents.


And for months events have been preparing me to be glad that I am a Jew. It would always have been better that I should have known the truth. I have always been rebelling against the secrecy that looked like shame. It is no shame to have Jewish parents—the shame is to disown it.


You say it was a shame to me, then, that I used that secrecy. There is no shame attaching to me. I have no reason to be ashamed. I rid myself of the Jewish tatters and gibberish that make people nudge each other at sight of us, as if we were tattooed under our clothes, though our faces are as whole as theirs. I delivered you from the pelting contempt that pursues Jewish separateness. I am not ashamed that I did it. It was the better for you.


Then why have you now undone the secrecy?—no, not undone it—the effects will never be undone. But why have you now sent for me to tell me that I am a Jew?


Why?—ah, why? I can’t explain; I can only say what is. I don’t love my father’s religion now any more than I did then. Before I married the second time I was baptized; I made myself like the people I lived among. I had a right to do it; I was not like a brute, obliged to go with my own herd. I have not repented; I will not say that I have repented. But yet It is illness, I don’t doubt that it has been gathering illness—my mind has gone back: more than a year ago it began. You see my gray hair, my worn look: it has all come fast. Sometimes I am in an agony of pain—I dare say I shall be to-night. Then it is as if all the life I have chosen to live, all thoughts, all will, forsook me and left me alone in spots of memory, and I can’t get away: my pain seems to keep me there. My childhood—my girlhood—the day of my marriage—the day of my father’s death—there seems to be nothing since. Then a great horror comes over me: what do I know of life or death? and what my father called ‘right’ may be a power that is laying hold of me—that is clutching me now. Well, I will satisfy him. I cannot go into the darkness without satisfying him. I have hidden what was his. I thought once I would burn it. I have not burned it. I thank God I have not burned it!


Will you not spare yourself this evening? Let us leave the rest till to-morrow.


No. I will confess it all, now that I have come up to it. Often when I am at ease it all fades away; my whole self comes quite back; but I know it will sink away again, and the other will come—the poor, solitary, forsaken remains of self, that can resist nothing. It was my nature to resist, and say, ‘I have a right to resist.’ Well, I say so still when I have any strength in me. You have heard me say it, and I don’t withdraw it. But when my strength goes, some other right forces itself upon me like iron in an inexorable hand; and even when I am at ease, it is beginning to make ghosts upon the daylight. And now you have made it worse for me, but I shall have told you everything. And what reproach is there against me, since I have made you glad to be a Jew? Joseph Kalonymos reproached me: he said you had been turned into a proud Englishman, who resented being touched by a Jew. I wish you had!


Who is Joseph Kalonymos?


Ah! some vengeance sent him back from the East, that he might see you and come to reproach me. He was my father’s friend. He knew of your birth: he knew of my husband’s death, and once, twenty years ago, after he had been away in the Levant, he came to see me and inquire about you. I told him that you were dead: I meant you to be dead to all the world of my childhood. If I had said that you were living, he would have interfered with my plans: he would have taken on him to represent my father, and have tried to make me recall what I had done. What could I do but say you were dead? The act was done. If I had told him of it there would have been trouble and scandal—and all to conquer me, who would not have been conquered. I was strong then, and I would have had my will, though there might have been a hard fight against me. I took the way to have it without any fight. I felt then that I was not really deceiving: it would have come to the same in the end; or if not to the same, to something worse. He believed me and begged that I would give up to him the chest that my father had charged me and my husband to deliver to our eldest son. I knew what was in the chest—things that had been dinned in my ears since I had had any understanding—things that were thrust on my mind that I might feel them like a wall around my life—my life that was growing like a tree. Once, after my husband died, I was going to burn the chest. But it was difficult to burn; and burning a chest and papers looks like a shameful act. I have committed no shameful act—except what Jews would call shameful. I had kept the chest, and I gave it to Joseph Kalonymos. He went away mournful, and said, ‘If you marry again, and if another grandson is born to him who is departed, I will deliver up the chest to him.’ I bowed in silence. I meant not to marry again—no more than I meant to be the shattered woman that I am now. If you marry again, and if another grandson is born to him who is departed, I will deliver up the chest to him.