after the holidays I shall teach in some schools. Besides, you know, I am as rich as a princess now. I have not touched the hundred pounds that Mrs. Klesmer gave me; and I should never be afraid that Ezra would be in want of anything, because there is Mr. Deronda,” and he said, ‘It is the chief honor of my life that your brother will share anything with me.’ Oh, no! Ezra and I can have no fears for each other about such things as food and clothing.”
“But there is some other fear on your mind,” said Mrs. Meyrick not without divination—”a fear of something that may disturb your peace; Don’t be forecasting evil, dear child, unless it is what you can guard against. Anxiety is good for nothing if we can’t turn it into a defense. But there’s no defense against all the things that might be. Have you any more reason for being anxious now than you had a month ago?”
“Yes, I have,” said Mirah. “I have kept it from Ezra. I have not dared to tell him. Pray forgive me that I can’t do without telling you. I
Mrs. Meyrick shrank into a smaller space, packing her arms across her chest and leaning forward—to hinder herself from pelting that father with her worst epithets.
“The year has changed him,” Mirah went on. “He had already been much altered and worn in the time before I left him. You remember I said how he used sometimes to cry. He was always excited one way or the other. I have told Ezra everything that I told you, and he says that my father had taken to gambling, which makes people easily distressed, and then again exalted. And now—it was only a moment that I saw him—his face was more haggard, and his clothes were shabby. He was with a much worse-looking man, who carried something, and they were hurrying along after an omnibus.”
“Well, child, he did not see you, I hope?”
“No. I had just come from Mrs. Raymond’s, and I was waiting to cross near the Marble Arch. Soon he was on the omnibus and gone out of sight. It was a dreadful moment. My old life seemed to have come back again, and it was worse than it had ever been before. And I could not help feeling it a new deliverance that he was gone out of sight without knowing that I was there. And yet it hurt me that I was feeling so—it seemed hateful in me—almost like words I once had to speak in a play, that ‘I had warmed my hands in the blood of my kindred.’ For where might my father be going? What may become of him? And his having a daughter who would own him in spite of all, might have hindered the worst. Is there any pain like seeing what ought to be the best things in life turned into the worst? All those opposite feelings were meeting and pressing against each other, and took up all my strength. No one could act that. Acting is slow and poor to what we go through within. I don’t know how I called a cab. I only remember that I was in it when I began to think, ‘I cannot tell Ezra; he must not know.’”
“You are afraid of grieving him?” Mrs. Meyrick asked, when Mirah had paused a little.
“Yes—and there is something more,” said Mirah, hesitatingly, as if she were examining her feeling before she would venture to speak of it. “I want to tell you; I cannot tell any one else. I could not have told my own mother: I should have closed it up before her. I feel shame for my father, and it is perhaps strange—but the shame is greater before Ezra than before any one else in the world. He desired me to tell him all about my life, and I obeyed him. But it is always like a smart to me to know that those things about my father are in Ezra’s mind. And—can you believe it? when the thought haunts me how it would be if my father were to come and show himself before us both, what seems as if it would scorch me most is seeing my father shrinking before Ezra. That is the truth. I don’t know whether it is a right feeling. But I can’t help thinking that I would rather try to maintain my father in secret, and bear a great deal in that way, if I could hinder him from meeting my brother.”
“You must not encourage that feeling, Mirah,” said Mrs. Meyrick, hastily. “It would be very dangerous; it would be wrong. You must not have concealment of that sort.”
“But ought I now to tell Ezra that I have seen my father?” said Mirah, with deprecation in her tone.
“No,” Mrs. Meyrick answered, dubitatively. “I don’t know that it is necessary to do that. Your father may go away with the birds. It is not clear that he came after you; you may never see him again. And then your brother will have been spared a useless anxiety. But promise me that if your father sees you—gets hold of you in any way again—and you will let us all know. Promise me that solemnly, Mirah. I have a right to ask it.”
Mirah reflected a little, then leaned forward to put her hands in Mrs. Meyrick’s, and said, “Since you ask it, I do promise. I will bear this feeling of shame. I have been so long used to think that I must bear that sort of inward pain. But the shame for my father burns me more when I think of his meeting Ezra.” She was silent a moment or two, and then said, in a new tone of yearning compassion, “And we are his children—and he was once young like us—and my mother loved him. Oh! I cannot help seeing it all close, and it hurts me like a cruelty.”
Mirah shed no tears: the discipline of her whole life had been against indulgence in such manifestation, which soon falls under the control of strong motives; but it seemed that the more intense expression of sorrow had entered into her voice. Mrs. Meyrick, with all her quickness and loving insight, did not quite understand that filial feeling in Mirah which had active roots deep below her indignation for the worst offenses. She could conceive that a mother would have a clinging pity and shame for a reprobate son, but she was out of patience with what she held an exaggerated susceptibility on behalf of this father, whose reappearance inclined her to wish him under the care of a turnkey. Mirah’s promise, however, was some security against her weakness.
That incident was the only reason that Mirah herself could have stated for the hidden sadness which Hans had divined. Of one element in her changed mood she could have given no definite account: it was something as dim as the sense of approaching weather-change, and had extremely slight external promptings, such as we are often ashamed to find all we can allege in support of the busy constructions that go on within us, not only without effort, but even against it, under the influence of any blind emotional stirring. Perhaps the first leaven of uneasiness was laid by Gwendolen’s behavior on that visit which was entirely superfluous as a means of engaging Mirah to sing, and could have no other motive than the excited and strange questioning about Deronda. Mirah had instinctively kept the visit a secret, but the active remembrance of it had raised a new susceptibility in her, and made her alive as she had never been before to the relations Deronda must have with that society which she herself was getting frequent glimpses of without belonging to it. Her peculiar life and education had produced in her an extraordinary mixture of unworldliness, with knowledge of the world’s evil, and even this knowledge was a strange blending of direct observation with the effects of reading and theatrical study. Her memory was furnished with abundant passionate situation and intrigue, which she never made emotionally her own, but felt a repelled aloofness from, as she had done from the actual life around her. Some of that imaginative knowledge began now to weave itself around Mrs. Grandcourt; and though Mirah would admit no position likely to affect her reverence for Deronda, she could not avoid a new painfully vivid association of his general life with a world away from her own, where there might be some involvement of his feeling and action with a woman like Gwendolen, who was increasingly repugnant to her— increasingly, even after she had ceased to see her; for liking and disliking can grow in meditation as fast as in the more immediate kind of presence. Any disquietude consciously due to the idea that Deronda’s deepest care might be for something remote not only from herself but even from his friendship for her brother, she would have checked with rebuking questions:—What was she but one who had shared his generous kindness with many others? and his attachment to her brother, was it not begun late to be soon ended? Other ties had come before, and others would remain after this had been cut by swift-coming death. But her uneasiness had not reached that point of self- recognition in which she would have been ashamed of it as an indirect, presumptuous claim on Deronda’s feeling. That she or any one else should think of him as her possible lover was a conception which had never entered her
