Chapter Fifty
This was the letter which Sir Hugo gave to Deronda:–
‘TO MY SON, DANIEL DERONDA.
‘My good friend, Sir Hugo Mallinger, will have told you that I wish to see you. My health is shaken, and I desire to lose no time before I deliver to you what I have long withheld. Be 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. Your unknown mother,
‘LEONORA HALM-EBERSTEIN.’
This letter with its colourless wording gave Deronda no clue to what awaited him. He could not help imagining possibilities, but he refused to regard any of them as likely. He simply attempted to prepare himself to meet the fact bravely, whatever it might turn out to be.
He could not tell anyone the reason for his absence, least of all Mordecai, whom it would affect as powerfully as it did himself, only in a different way. If he were to say, “I am going to learn the truth about my birth,” Mordecai’s hopes might be dangerously excited. So he spoke of his journey as being undertaken by Sir Hugo’s wish, with as much indifference and vagueness as he could.
“I will ask to have the child Jacob to stay with me,” said Mordecai.
“I will ask Mrs. Cohen to let him come,” said Mirah.
“The grandmother will deny you nothing,” said Deronda. “I’m glad you were wrong,” he added, smiling at Mordecai. “You thought that old Mrs. Cohen would not bear to see Mirah.”
“I undervalued her heart,” said Mordecai. “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,” said Mirah, with merriment.
“What should you have felt if that Ezra had been your brother?” said Deronda mischievously.
Mirah looked at him with slight surprise, and said, “He is not a bad man – I think he would never forsake anyone.” Then she blushed deeply, glancing timidly at Mordecai: her father was in her mind. “If he should find us!” was a thought which sometimes haunted Mirah.
Deronda understood the blush, for her feelings about her parent seemed near to his own. That letter which had brought his mother nearer in reality had made her more remote in his affections. The tender yearning after an imagined mother had long been secretly present within him in his observation of all women. But it seemed now that this picture of his mother might not fit the facts: her enigmatic letter had thrust away that image created by his longing.
When Deronda arrived at the Italia in Genoa, no Princess Halm-Eberstein was there; but there was a letter for him, saying that she might arrive within a week or two, and entreating him to wait patiently.
Under this suspense, Deronda set about the difficult task of seeking amusement as a means of quieting his excitement and giving patience a lift over a weary road. He spent the cooler hours in wandering about to observe the streets and the quay; and he often took a boat to enjoy the magnificent view of the city from the sea.
Mordecai and Mirah were ever-present in his thoughts; and while his boat was pushing about within view of the grand harbour, he imagined the multitudinous Spanish Jews centuries ago, driven destitute and starving from their homes into crowded ships, and allowed only a brief rest on this grand quay of Genoa. Inevitably, dreamy constructions of his possible ancestry would weave themselves with this history, which had acquired a new interest for him since meeting Mirah and Mordecai. He had never yet fully admitted to himself that he wished the facts to verify Mordecai’s conviction: he inwardly repeated that he had no choice in the matter, and that wishing was folly. He had simply to accept the fact.
Across these thoughts, there came continually another anxiety which he made no effort to banish. Rather, he dwelt on it with a mournfulness which often seems to us the best atonement we can make to one whom we have been unable to help. The anxiety was for Gwendolen. His feeling for her was not passionate love, yet was not the same as friendship, or a merely benevolent regard. A man may express this feeling in the words, “I should have loved her, if…”: the “if” covering some circumstance set against the emotions ready to quiver out of balance.
Deronda had never throughout his relations with Gwendolen been free from the nervous consciousness that there was something to guard against, not only on her account but on his own – that any impulsive action on his part would ruin her trust in him, which worked upon him now like the retreating cry of a creature snatched and carried out of his reach. How could his feelings for Gwendolen ever be exactly like his feelings for other women, even when there was one by whose side he desired to stand? Although Deronda did not imagine himself to be of supreme importance to any woman, Gwendolen’s insistence that he must “remain near her – must not forsake her” continually recurred to him with piercing clearness.
Day after day passed, and in Genoa, the noons were getting hotter, the outer roads getting deeper with white dust, the oleanders in the tubs along the wayside gardens looking more and more like fatigued holiday-makers, and the sweet evening sowing the paths with happy tinklings of mule-bells and thrumming of strings, light footsteps and voices; while the encircling heights, crowned with forts, skirted with gardens, seemed to come forth in fullness of beauty after their long siesta, till all strong colour melted in the moonlight. Then slowly with the descending moon all sank in deep night and silence, and nothing shone but the port lights of the great Lanterna in the blackness below, and the glimmering stars in the blackness above.
Deronda, in his suspense, watched this revolving of the days as he might have watched a wonderful antique clock, and found himself contemplating all activity with the aloofness of a prisoner awaiting ransom. In his letters to Mordecai and Hans, he avoided writing about himself, but he was really in that state of mind in which all subjects become personal; and the few books he had brought with him were unreadable in his agitating uncertainty.
On many nights, he gazed from the open window of his room on the double, faintly pierced darkness of the sea and the heavens; often struggling under the oppressive scepticism which made him think of his lot as of no more lasting effect than a dream; sometimes with an emotional reaction which gave even to disappointment the nature of a satisfied energy, and spread over his young future, whatever it might be, the attraction of devoted service; sometimes with a sweet irresistible hopefulness that the very best of human possibilities might befall him – the blending of a complete personal love with a larger duty; and sometimes again in a mood of rebellion against things in general because they are thus and not otherwise, a mood in which Gwendolen and her fate moved as busy images of what was amiss in the world along with the concealments in his own life, which now afflicted him with doubt about the mother who had announced herself coldly and still kept away.
But at last she was come. One morning in his third week of waiting there was a knock at the door. A liveried servant entered and delivered the message that the Princess Halm-Eberstein had arrived, that she was going to rest during the day, but would be obliged if Monsieur would be at liberty at seven, when she would be able to receive him.
George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: Abridged Page 53