Daniel Deronda

“It is better so,” said the Princess, in a softer, mellower voice. “There could be nothing but hard duty for you, even if it were possible for you to take the place of my son. You would not love me. Don’t deny it,” she said, abruptly, putting up her hand. “I know what is the truth. You don’t like what I did. You are angry with me. You think I robbed you of something. You are on your grandfather’s side, and you will always have a condemnation of me in your heart.”

Deronda felt himself under a ban of silence. He rose from his seat by her, preferring to stand, if he had to obey that imperious prohibition of any tenderness. But his mother now looked up at him with a new admiration in her glance, saying—

“You are wrong to be angry with me. You are the better for what I did.” After pausing a little, she added, abruptly, “And now tell me what you shall do?”

“Do you mean now, immediately,” said Deronda; “or as to the course of my future life?”

“I mean in the future. What difference will it make to you that I have told you about your birth?”

“A very great difference,” said Deronda, emphatically. “I can hardly think of anything that would make a greater difference.”

“What shall you do then?” said the Princess, with more sharpness. “Make yourself just like your grandfather— be what he wished you—turn yourself into a Jew like him?”

“That is impossible. The effect of my education can never be done away with. The Christian sympathies in which my mind was reared can never die out of me,” said Deronda, with increasing tenacity of tone. “But I consider it my duty—it is the impulse of my feeling—to identify myself, as far as possible, with my hereditary people, and if I can see any work to be done for them that I can give my soul and hand to I shall choose to do it.”

His mother had her eyes fixed on him with a wondering speculation, examining his face as if she thought that by close attention she could read a difficult language there. He bore her gaze very firmly, sustained by a resolute opposition, which was the expression of his fullest self. She bent toward him a little, and said, with a decisive emphasis—

“You are in love with a Jewess.”

Deronda colored and said, “My reasons would be independent of any such fact.”

“I know better. I have seen what men are,” said the Princess, peremptorily. “Tell me the truth. She is a Jewess who will not accept any one but a Jew. There are a few such,” she added, with a touch of scorn.

Deronda had that objection to answer which we all have known in speaking to those who are too certain of their own fixed interpretations to be enlightened by anything we may say. But besides this, the point immediately in question was one on which he felt a repugnance either to deny or affirm. He remained silent, and she presently said—

“You love her as your father loved me, and she draws you after her as I drew him.”

Those words touched Deronda’s filial imagination, and some tenderness in his glance was taken by his mother as an assent. She went on with rising passion: “But I was leading him the other way. And now your grandfather is getting his revenge.”

“Mother,” said Deronda, remonstrantly, “don’t let us think of it in that way. I will admit that there may come some benefit from the education you chose for me. I prefer cherishing the benefit with gratitude, to dwelling with resentment on the injury. I think it would have been right that I should have been brought up with the consciousness that I was a Jew, but it must always have been a good to me to have as wide an instruction and sympathy as possible. And now, you have restored me my inheritance—events have brought a fuller restitution than you could have made—you have been saved from robbing my people of my service and me of my duty: can you not bring your whole soul to consent to this?”

Deronda paused in his pleading: his mother looked at him listeningly, as if the cadence of his voice were taking her ear, yet she shook her head slowly. He began again, even more urgently.

“You have told me that you sought what you held the best for me: open your heart to relenting and love toward my grandfather, who sought what he held the best for you.”

“Not for me, no,” she said, shaking her head with more absolute denial, and folding her arms tightly. “I tell you, he never thought of his daughter except as an instrument. Because I had wants outside his purpose, I was to be put in a frame and tortured. If that is the right law for the world, I will not say that I love it. If my acts were wrong—if it is God who is exacting from me that I should deliver up what I withheld—who is punishing me because I deceived my father and did not warn him that I should contradict his trust—well, I have told everything. I have done what I could. And your soul consents. That is enough. I have after all been the instrument my father wanted.—’I desire a grandson who shall have a true Jewish heart. Every Jew should rear his family as if he hoped that a Deliverer might spring from it.’”

In uttering these last sentences the Princess narrowed her eyes, waved her head up and down, and spoke slowly with a new kind of chest-voice, as if she were quoting unwillingly.

“Were those my grandfather’s words?” said Deronda.

“Yes, yes; and you will find them written. I wanted to thwart him,” said the Princess, with a sudden outburst of the passion she had shown in the former interview. Then she added more slowly, “You would have me love what I have hated from the time I was so high”—here she held her left hand a yard from the floor.—”That can never be. But what does it matter? His yoke has been on me, whether I loved it or not. You are the grandson he wanted. You speak as men do—as if you felt yourself wise. What does it all mean?”

Her tone was abrupt and scornful. Deronda, in his pained feeling, and under the solemn urgency of the moment, had to keep a clutching remembrance of their relationship, lest his words should become cruel. He began in a deep entreating tone:

“Mother, don’t say that I feel myself wise. We are set in the midst of difficulties. I see no other way to get any clearness than by being truthful—not by keeping back facts which may—which should carry obligation within them —which should make the only guidance toward duty. No wonder if such facts come to reveal themselves in spite of concealments. The effects prepared by generations are likely to triumph over a contrivance which would bend them all to the satisfaction of self. Your will was strong, but my grandfather’s trust which you accepted and did not fulfill—what you call his yoke—is the expression of something stronger, with deeper, farther-spreading roots, knit into the foundations of sacredness for all men. You renounced me—you still banish me—as a son”—there was an involuntary movement of indignation in Deronda’s voice—”But that stronger Something has determined that I shall