her, little mother, and go to Regent Street. It’s plenty of time to get anything you like—a black silk dress such as ladies wear. She must not be taken for an object of charity. She has talents to make people indebted to her.”
“I think it is what Mr. Deronda would like—for her to have a handsome dress,” said Mrs. Meyrick, deliberating.
“Of course it is,” said Hans, with some sharpness. “You may take my word for what a gentleman would feel.”
“I wish to do what Mr. Deronda would like me to do,” said Mirah, gravely, seeing that Mrs. Meyrick looked toward her; and Hans, turning on his heel, went to Kate’s table and took up one of her drawings as if his interest needed a new direction.
“Shouldn’t you like to make a study of Klesmer’s head, Hans?” said Kate. “I suppose you have often seen him?”
“Seen him!” exclaimed Hans, immediately throwing back his head and mane, seating himself at the piano and looking round him as if he were surveying an amphitheatre, while he held his fingers down perpendicularly toward the keys. But then in another instant he wheeled round on the stool, looked at Mirah and said, half timidly —”Perhaps you don’t like this mimicry; you must always stop my nonsense when you don’t like it.”
Mirah had been smiling at the swiftly-made image, and she smiled still, but with a touch of something else than amusement, as she said—”Thank you. But you have never done anything I did not like. I hardly think he could, belonging to you,” she added, looking at Mrs. Meyrick.
In this way Hans got food for his hope. How could the rose help it when several bees in succession took its sweet odor as a sign of personal attachment?
CHAPTER XL.
“Within the soul a faculty abides, That with interpositions, which would hide And darken, so can deal, that they become Contingencies of pomp; and serve to exalt Her native brightness, as the ample moon. In the deep stillness of a summer even. Rising behind a thick and lofty grove. Into a substance glorious as her own, Yea, with her own incorporated, by power Capacious and serene.” —WORDSWORTH:
Deronda came out of the narrow house at Chelsea in a frame of mind that made him long for some good bodily exercise to carry off what he was himself inclined to call the fumes of his temper. He was going toward the city, and the sight of the Chelsea Stairs with the waiting boats at once determined him to avoid the irritating inaction of being driven in a cab, by calling a wherry and taking an oar.
His errand was to go to Ram’s book-shop, where he had yesterday arrived too late for Mordecai’s midday watch, and had been told that he invariably came there again between five and six. Some further acquaintance with this remarkable inmate of the Cohens was particularly desired by Deronda as a preliminary to redeeming his ring: he wished that their conversation should not again end speedily with that drop of Mordecai’s interest which was like the removal of a drawbridge, and threatened to shut out any easy communication in future. As he got warmed with the use of the oar, fixing his mind on the errand before him and the ends he wanted to achieve on Mirah’s account, he experienced, as was wont with him, a quick change of mental light, shifting his point of view to that of the person whom he had been thinking of hitherto chiefly as serviceable to his own purposes, and was inclined to taunt himself with being not much better than an enlisting sergeant, who never troubles himself with the drama that brings him the needful recruits.
“I suppose if I got from this man the information I am most anxious about,” thought Deronda, “I should be contented enough if he felt no disposition to tell me more of himself, or why he seemed to have some expectation from me which was disappointed. The sort of curiosity he stirs would die out; and yet it might be that he had neared and parted as one can imagine two ships doing, each freighted with an exile who would have recognized the other if the two could have looked out face to face. Not that there is any likelihood of a peculiar tie between me and this poor fellow, whose voyage, I fancy, must soon be over. But I wonder whether there is much of that momentous mutual missing between people who interchange blank looks, or even long for one another’s absence in a crowded place. However, one makes one’s self chances of missing by going on the recruiting sergeant’s plan.”
When the wherry was approaching Blackfriars Bridge, where Deronda meant to land, it was half-past four, and the gray day was dying gloriously, its western clouds all broken into narrowing purple strata before a wide- spreading saffron clearness, which in the sky had a monumental calm, but on the river, with its changing objects, was reflected as a luminous movement, the alternate flash of ripples or currents, the sudden glow of the brown sail, the passage of laden barges from blackness into color, making an active response to that brooding glory.
Feeling well heated by this time, Deronda gave up the oar and drew over him again his Inverness cape. As he lifted up his head while fastening the topmost button his eyes caught a well-remembered face looking toward him over the parapet of the bridge—brought out by the western light into startling distinctness and brilliancy—an illuminated type of bodily emaciation and spiritual eagerness. It was the face of Mordecai, who also, in his watch toward the west, had caught sight of the advancing boat, and had kept it fast within his gaze, at first simply because it was advancing, then with a recovery of impressions that made him quiver as with a presentiment, till at last the nearing figure lifted up its face toward him—the face of his visions—and then immediately, with white uplifted hand, beckoned again and again.
For Deronda, anxious that Mordecai should recognize and await him, had lost no time before signaling, and the answer came straightway. Mordecai lifted his cap and waved it—feeling in that moment that his inward prophecy was fulfilled. Obstacles, incongruities, all melted into the sense of completion with which his soul was flooded by this outward satisfaction of his longing. His exultation was not widely different from that of the experimenter, bending over the first stirrings of change that correspond to what in the fervor of concentrated prevision his thought has foreshadowed. The prefigured friend had come from the golden background, and had signaled to him: this actually was: the rest was to be.
In three minutes Deronda had landed, had paid his boatman, and was joining Mordecai, whose instinct it was to stand perfectly still and wait for him.
“I was very glad to see you standing here,” said Deronda, “for I was intending to go on to the book-shop and look for you again. I was there yesterday—perhaps they mentioned it to you?”
“Yes,” said Mordecai; “that was the reason I came to the bridge.”
This answer, made with simple gravity, was startlingly mysterious to Deronda. Were the peculiarities of this man really associated with any sort of mental alienation, according to Cohen’s hint?
“You knew nothing of my being at Chelsea?” he said, after a moment.
“No; but I expected you to come down the river. I have been waiting for you these five years.” Mordecai’s deep-sunk eyes were fixed on those of the friend who had at last arrived with a look of affectionate dependence, at once pathetic and solemn. Deronda’s sensitiveness was not the less responsive because he could not but believe that this strangely-disclosed relation was founded on an illusion.
“It will be a satisfaction to me if I can be of any real use to you,” he answered, very earnestly. “Shall we get
