Chapter Forty-three
After a few minutes the stillness penetrated Mordecai’s consciousness, and he looked up at Deronda with a gaze full of satisfaction. He began to speak quietly, as if he were thinking aloud.
“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 room for new souls to be born. It is the 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, and has spoken truth, though only in parable. When my long-wandering soul is liberated from this weary body, it will join yours, and its work will be perfected.”
Deronda tried to answer truthfully: “Everything I can do to make your life effective I will do.”
“I know it,” said Mordecai with quiet certainty. “You are by my side on the mount of vision, and behold the paths of fulfilment which others deny.” After a moment he went on meditatively–
“You will take up my life where it was broken. I feel myself back in that day. The bright morning sun was on the quay at Trieste – the boats were pushing off – the Greek vessel that would land us at Beirut 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 labour; I had the endurance of youth. My heart exulted as if it had been the heart of Moses ben Maimon; and standing on the quay, where the ground 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 existence seemed to melt. 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; who came and said: ‘Ezra, here is your letter.’”
“Ezra!” exclaimed Deronda.
“Ezra,” repeated Mordecai, engrossed in memory. “I was expecting a letter from my mother. And that sound of my name recalled me to my body. I opened the letter; and the name came again as a cry that made me yearn to reach where that sorrow was – ‘Ezra, my son!’”
Mordecai paused again. Deronda’s mind was breathlessly suspended on what was coming. A strange possibility had suddenly presented itself. Mordecai went on–
“She was a mother whom her children would call blessed. 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 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.’”
Here Mordecai laid his hand on Deronda’s arm, and said, “Mine was the lot of Israel. For the sin of the father, my soul must go into exile. For the sin of the father the work was broken, and the day of fulfilment delayed. My mother was desolate and destitute. I turned back, and travelled with hardship, to save the scant money which she would need. I left the sunshine, and travelled into freezing cold. I spent a night exposed to cold and snow. And that was the beginning of this slow death.”
Mordecai let his eyes wander and removed his hand. Deronda resolutely repressed his urgent questions. While Mordecai was in this state of emotion, he could not ask: nay, he felt a kindred emotion which made him dread his own speech as too momentous.
“But I worked. We were destitute, and she was ill. 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 night I heard her crying for her child. Then I rose, and we prayed together. We poured forth our souls in desire that Mirah might be delivered from evil.”
“Mirah?” Deronda repeated, wishing to assure himself that his ears had not been deceived. “Did you say Mirah?”
“That was my little sister’s name. After we had prayed for her, my mother would rest. It lasted four years, and in the minute she died, we were praying the same prayer. Her soul went out upon its wings.”
“Have you never since heard of your sister?” said Deronda.
“Never. Never have I heard whether she was delivered. I know not, I know not. 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 blessing that I was alone in the winters of suffering. But now” – here Mordecai again rested his hand on Deronda’s arm, and looked at him with joy – “now there is nothing to bewail in the withering of my body. The work will be the better done. I shall live in you.”
His grasp became convulsive in its force, and Deronda, agitated as never before in his certainty that this was Mirah’s brother, felt his strong young heart beating faster and his lips paling. He shrank from speech. He feared, in Mordecai’s state of exaltation (already an alarming strain on his feeble frame), to utter a word about Mirah.
Instead, he laid his firm, gentle hand on Mordecai’s, which relaxed its grasp, and turned upward. As the two palms pressed each other Mordecai recovered some sense of his surroundings, and said–
“Let us go now. I cannot talk any longer.”
They parted at Cohen’s door without exchanging words – merely another pressure of hands.
Deronda felt a weight on him which was half joy, half anxiety. The joy of finding in Mirah’s brother a nature more than worthy of that relation to her, had the weight of solemnity and sadness; the reunion of brother and sister was in reality the first stage of a supreme parting. Then there was the weight of anxiety about the revelation of the fact on both sides, and the arrangements he would need to make beforehand. He wished to remove any jarring outwards conditions for their first meeting. Notwithstanding the Cohens’ good nature, he resolved to keep them in the background until Mirah might want to thank them for the kindness they had shown her brother.
Deronda wished also to give Mordecai surroundings more suited to his frail bodily condition, and to the prospect of Mirah’s making her home with her brother, and tending him through the precious remnant of his life. He thought this task would be difficult and delicate, especially in persuading Mordecai to change his abode.
Concerning Mirah’s feeling, he had no doubt: Mirah would understand her brother’s greatness. Yes, greatness: that was the word which Deronda now deliberately chose to use. He said to himself, perhaps rather defiantly, that this consumptive Jewish workman in threadbare clothing, lodged by charity, had the elements of greatness; a mind energetically moving with the larger march of human destinies, but not the less full of tenderness for those nearby; capable of conceiving and choosing a life’s task, yet capable too of the unapplauded heroism which turns off the road of achievement at the call of nearer duty.
Deronda felt that the brief remnant of this fervid life had become his charge. He had been particularly affected by the friendly indifference which Mordecai had met with at the club. He had experience of the small space that ardour finds in ordinary minds; and this had resulted in a reserve – a dislike of appearing unusual or of risking an ineffective insistence on his own opinion. But now, for the first time, he felt as a reality the lives that burn themselves out in solitary enthusiasm: martyrs of obscure circumstance, exiled in the rarity of their own minds, whose speech is no more than a long passionate soliloquy.
Deronda’s imagination was moving in the direction of Mordecai’s desires. For all his latent objection to vague schemes, he felt at one with this man who had chosen him. He had not the Jewish consciousness, but he had a yearning for the obligation of filial and social ties.
So he set about his new task ungrudgingly; and again thought of Mrs. Meyrick as his chief helper. To her first he must make known the discovery of Mi
rah’s brother, and with her he must consult on how to bring the lost together. Then he must find a healthy lodging for Mordecai, and give it some faint likeness to a refined home, by dismantling his own chambers of his best old books, his easiest chair, and the bas-reliefs of Milton and Dante.
But was not Mirah to be there? What furniture can give such finish to a room as a tender woman’s face? – and is there any harmony of tints that can delight as much as her sweet voice? Here is one good, at least, thought Deronda, that comes from Mordecai’s having fixed his imagination on me. He has recovered a perfect sister, whose affection is waiting for him.
George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: Abridged Page 46