by George Eliot
“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,” said Mr. Gascoigne. “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,” said Gwendolen, escaping from a promise to give information that would certainly have been received in a way inconceivable to the good rector, who, pushing his chair a little aside from the table and crossing his leg, looked as well as if he felt like a worthy specimen of a clergyman and magistrate giving experienced advice. Mr. Gascoigne had come to the conclusion that Grandcourt was a proud man, but his own self-love, calmed through life by the consciousness of his general value and personal advantages, was not irritable enough to prevent him from hoping the best about his niece’s husband because her uncle was kept rather haughtily at a distance. A certain aloofness must be allowed to the representative of an old family; you would not expect him to be on intimate terms even with abstractions. But Mrs. Gascoigne was less dispassionate on her husband’s account, and felt Grandcourt’s haughtiness as something a little blameable in Gwendolen.
“Your uncle and Anna will very likely be in town about Easter,” she said, with a vague sense of expressing a slight discontent. “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,” said Gwendolen, risking herself so far, for the sake of the present moment, but in reality wishing that she might never be obliged to bring any of her family near Grandcourt again. “I am very glad of Rex’s good fortune.”
“We must not be premature, and rejoice too much beforehand,” said the rector, to whom this topic was the happiest in the world, and altogether allowable, now that the issue of that little affair about Gwendolen had been so satisfactory. “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,” said Mrs. Gascoigne.
“How very nice!” said Gwendolen, with a concealed scepticism as to niceness in general, which made the word quite applicable to lawyers.
“Talking of Lord Brackenshaw’s kindness,” said Mrs. Davilow, “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,” said Gwendolen, in a melancholy tone.
“Oh, I am saving money for that. You know who has made me rather rich, dear,” said Mrs. Davilow, laying her hand on Gwendolen’s. “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,” said Gwendolen, suddenly putting up her hand to her hair and perhaps creating a desired disarrangement. Her heart was swelling, and she was ready to cry. Her mother must have been worse off, if it had not been for Grandcourt. “I suppose I shall never see all this again,” said Gwendolen, looking round her, as they entered the black and yellow bedroom, and then throwing herself into a chair in front of the glass with a little groan as of bodily fatigue. In the resolve not to cry she had become very pale.
“You are not well, dear?” said Mrs. Davilow.
“No; that chocolate has made me sick,” said Gwendolen, putting up her hand to be taken.
“I should be allowed to come to you if you were ill, darling,” said Mrs. Davilow, rather timidly, as she pressed the hand to her bosom. Something had made her sure today that her child loved her—needed her as much as ever.
“Oh, yes,” said Gwendolen, leaning her head against her mother, though speaking as lightly as she could. “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.” She turned up her face with a smile.
“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?” said Gwendolen, starting up with a desperate resolve to be playful, and keep no more on the perilous edge of agitation. “And I should not have done that unless it had pleased myself.” She tossed up her chin, and reached her hat.
“God forbid, child! I would not have had you marry for my sake. Your happiness by itself is half mine.”
“Very well,” said Gwendolen, arranging her hat fastidiously, “then you will please to consider that you are half happy, which is more than I am used to seeing you.” With the last words she again turned with her old playful smile to her mother. “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.” Gwendolen put the notes into her mother’s hands and looked away hastily, moving toward the door.
“God bless you, dear,” said Mrs. Davilow. “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,” said Gwendolen, turning and nodding playfully. She hardly understood her own feeling in this act toward her sisters, but at any rate she did not wish it to be taken as anything serious. She was glad to have got out of the bedroom without showing more signs of emotion, and she went through the rest of her visit and all the goodbyes with a quiet propriety that made her say to herself sarcastically as she rode away, “I think I am making a very good Mrs. Grandcourt.”
She believed that her husband had gone to Gadsmere that day—had inferred this, as she had long ago inferred who were the inmates of what he had described as “a dog-hutch of a place in a black country;” and the strange conflict of feeling within her had had the characteristic effect of sending her to Offendene with a tightened resolve—a form of excitement which was native to her.
She wondered at her own contradictions. Why should she feel it bitter to her that Grandcourt showed concern for the beings on whose account she herself was undergoing remorse? Had she not before her marriage inwardly determined to speak and act on their behalf?—and since he had lately implied that he wanted to be in town because he was making arrangements about his will, she ought to have been glad of any sign that he kept a conscience awake toward those at Gadsmere; and yet, now that she was a wife, the sense that Grandcourt was gone to Gadsmere was like red heat near a burn. She had brought on herself this indignity in her own eyes—this humiliation of being doomed to a terrified silence lest her husband should discover with what sort of consciousness she had married him; and as she had said to Deronda, she “must go on.” After the intense moments of secret hatred toward this husband who from the very first had cowed her, there always came back the spiritual pressure which made submission inevitable. There was no effort at freedoms that would not bring fresh and worse humiliation. Gwendolen could dare nothing except an impulsive action—least of all could
she dare premeditatedly a vague future in which the only certain condition was indignity. In spite of remorse, it still seemed the worst result of her marriage that she should in any way make a spectacle of herself; and her humiliation was lightened by her thinking that only Mrs. Glasher was aware of the fact which caused it. For Gwendolen had never referred the interview at the Whispering Stones to Lush’s agency; her disposition to vague terror investing with shadowy omnipresence any threat of fatal power over her, and so hindering her from imagining plans and channels by which news had been conveyed to the woman who had the poisoning skill of a sorceress. To Gwendolen’s mind the secret lay with Mrs. Glasher, and there were words in the horrible letter which implied that Mrs. Glasher would dread disclosure to the husband, as much as the usurping Mrs. Grandcourt.
Something else, too, she thought of as more of a secret from her husband than it really was—namely that suppressed struggle of desperate rebellion which she herself dreaded. Grandcourt could not indeed fully imagine how things affected Gwendolen: he had no imagination of anything in her but what affected the gratification of his own will; but on this point he had the sensibility which seems like divination. What we see exclusively we are apt to see with some mistake of proportions; and Grandcourt was not likely to be infallible in his judgments concerning this wife who was governed by many shadowy powers, to him nonexistent. He magnified her inward resistance, but that did not lessen his satisfaction in the mastery of it.
CHAPTER XLV.
Behold my lady’s carriage stop the way. With powdered lacquey and with charming bay; She sweeps the matting, treads the crimson stair. Her arduous function solely “to be there.” Like Sirius rising o’er the silent sea. She hides her heart in lustre loftily.
So the Grandcourts were in Grosvenor Square in time to receive a card for the musical party at Lady Mallinger’s, there being reasons of business which made Sir Hugo know beforehand that his ill-beloved nephew was coming up. It was only the third evening after their arrival, and Gwendolen made rather an absent-minded acquaintance with her new ceilings and furniture, preoccupied with the certainty that she was going to speak to Deronda again, and also to see the Miss Lapidoth who had gone through so much, and was “capable of submitting to anything in the form of duty.” For Gwendolen had remembered nearly every word that Deronda had said about Mirah, and especially that phrase, which she repeated to herself bitterly, having an ill-defined consciousness that her own submission was something very different. She would have been obliged to allow, if any one had said it to her, that what she submitted to could not take the shape of duty, but was submission to a yoke drawn on her by an action she was ashamed of, and worn with a strength of selfish motives that left no weight for duty to carry.
The drawing-rooms in Park Lane, all white, gold, and pale crimson, were agreeably furnished, and not crowded with guests, before Mr. and Mrs. Grandcourt entered; and more than half an hour of instrumental music was being followed by an interval of movement and chat. Klesmer was there with his wife, and in his generous interest for Mirah he proposed to accompany her singing of Leo’s “O patria mia,” which he had before recommended her to choose, as more distinctive of her than better known music. He was already at the piano, and Mirah was standing there conspicuously, when Gwendolen, magnificent in her pale green velvet and poisoned diamonds, was ushered to a seat of honor well in view of them. With her long sight and self-command she had the rare power of quickly distinguishing persons and objects on entering a full room, and while turning her glance toward Mirah she did not neglect to exchange a bow with Klesmer as she passed. The smile seemed to each a lightning-flash back on that morning when it had been her ambition to stand as the “little Jewess” was standing, and survey a grand audience from the higher rank of her talent—instead of which she was one of the ordinary crowd in silk and gems, whose utmost performance it must be to admire or find fault. “He thinks I am in the right road now,” said the lurking resentment within her.
Gwendolen had not caught sight of Deronda in her passage, and while she was seated acquitting herself in chat with Sir Hugo, she glanced round her with careful ease, bowing a recognition here and there, and fearful lest an anxious-looking exploration in search of Deronda might be observed by her husband, and afterward rebuked as something “damnably vulgar.” But all traveling, even that of a slow gradual glance round a room, brings a liability to undesired encounters, and amongst the eyes that met Gwendolen’s, forcing her into a slight bow, were those of the “amateur too fond of Meyerbeer,” Mr. Lush, whom Sir Hugo continued to find useful as a half-caste among gentlemen. He was standing near her husband, who, however, turned a shoulder toward him, and was being understood to listen to Lord Pentreath. How was it that at this moment, for the first time, there darted through Gwendolen, like a disagreeable sensation, the idea that this man knew all about her husband’s life? He had been banished from her sight, according to her will, and she had been satisfied; he had sunk entirely into the background of her thoughts, screened away from her by the agitating figures that kept up an inward drama in which Lush had no place. Here suddenly he reappeared at her husband’s elbow, and there sprang up in her, like an instantaneously fabricated memory in a dream, the sense of his being connected with the secrets that made her wretched. She was conscious of effort in turning her head away from him, trying to continue her wandering survey as if she had seen nothing of more consequence than the picture on the wall, till she discovered Deronda. But he was not looking toward her, and she withdrew her eyes from him, without having got any recognition, consoling herself with the assurance that he must have seen her come in. In fact, he was not standing far from the door with Hans Meyrick, whom he had been careful to bring into Lady Mallinger’s list. They were both a little more anxious than was comfortable lest Mirah should not be heard to advantage. Deronda even felt himself on the brink of betraying emotion, Mirah’s presence now being linked with crowding images of what had gone before and was to come after—all centering in the brother he was soon to reveal to her; and he had escaped as soon as he could from the side of Lady Pentreath, who had said in her violoncello voice—
“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.”
He was beginning to feel on Mirah’s behalf something of what he had felt for himself in his seraphic boyish time, when Sir Hugo asked him if he would like to be a great singer—an indignant dislike to her being remarked on in a free and easy way, as if she were an imported commodity disdainfully paid for by the fashionable public, and he winced the more because Mordecai, he knew, would feel that the name “Jewess” was taken as a sort of stamp like the lettering of Chinese silk. In this susceptible mood he saw the Grandcourts enter, and was immediately appealed to by Hans about “that Vandyke duchess of a beauty.” Pray excuse Deronda that in this moment he felt a transient renewal of his first repulsion from Gwendolen, as if she and her beauty and her failings were to blame for the undervaluing of Mirah as a woman—a feeling something like class animosity, which affection for what is not fully recognized by others, whether in persons or in poetry, rarely allows us to escape. To Hans admiring Gwendolen with his habitual hyperbole, he answered, with a sarcasm that was not quite good-natured—
“I thought you could admire no style of woman but your Berenice.”
“That is the style I worship—not admire,” said Hans. “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,” said Deronda, under the pretext that the singing was going to begin. He was not so delighted with the answer as might have been expected, and was relieved by Hans’s movement to a more advanced spot.
Deronda had never before heard Mirah sing “O patria mia.” He knew well Leopardi’s fine Ode to Italy (when Italy sat like a disconsolate mother in chains, hiding her face on her knees and weepi
ng), and the few selected words were filled for him with the grandeur of the whole, which seemed to breath an inspiration through the music. Mirah singing this, made Mordecai more than ever one presence with her. Certain words not included in the song nevertheless rang within Deronda as harmonies from the invisible—
“Non ti difende Nessun de tuoi! L’armi, qua l’armi: io solo Combattero, procombero sol io”— [Footnote: Do none of thy children defend thee? Arms! bring me arms! alone I will fight, alone I will fall.]
they seemed the very voice of that heroic passion which is falsely said to devote itself in vain when it achieves the godlike end of manifesting unselfish love. And that passion was present to Deronda now as the vivid image of a man dying helplessly away from the possibility of battle.
Mirah was equal to his wishes. While the general applause was sounding, Klesmer gave a more valued testimony, audible to her only—”Good, good—the crescendo better than before.” But her chief anxiety was to know that she had satisfied Mr. Deronda: any failure on her part this evening would have pained her as an especial injury to him. Of course all her prospects were due to what he had done for her; still, this occasion of singing in the house that was his home brought a peculiar demand. She looked toward him in the distance, and he saw that she did; but he remained where he was, and watched the streams of emulous admirers closing round her, till presently they parted to make way for Gwendolen, who was taken up to be introduced by Mrs. Klesmer. Easier now about “the little Jewess,” Daniel relented toward poor Gwendolen in her splendor, and his memory went back, with some penitence for his momentary hardness, over all the signs and confessions that she too needed a rescue, and one much more difficult than that of the wanderer by the river—a rescue for which he felt himself helpless. The silent question—”But is it not cowardly to make that a reason for turning away?” was the form in which he framed his resolve to go near her on the first opportunity, and show his regard for her past confidence, in spite of Sir Hugo’s unwelcome hints.