Daniel Deronda Part 58

"But it is a very cruel form," said Gwendolen, beating her foot on the ground with returning agitation. "I am frightened at everything. I am frightened at myself. When my blood is fired I can do daring things--take any leap; but that makes me frightened at myself." She was looking at nothing outside her; but her eyes were directed toward the window, away from Deronda, who, with quick comprehension said--

"Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of increasing that remorse which is so bitter to you. Fixed meditation may do a great deal toward defining our longing or dread. We are not always in a state of strong emotion, and when we are calm we can use our memories and gradually change the bias of our fear, as we do our tastes. Take your fear as a safeguard. It is like quickness of hearing.

It may make consequences pa.s.sionately present to you. Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision."

Deronda uttered each sentence more urgently; he felt as if he were seizing a faint chance of rescuing her from some indefinite danger.

"Yes, I know; I understand what you mean," said Gwendolen in her loud whisper, not turning her eyes, but lifting up her small gloved hand and waving it in deprecation of the notion that it was easy to obey that advice. "But if feelings rose--there are some feelings--hatred and anger--how can I be good when they keep rising? And if there came a moment when I felt stifled and could bear it no longer----" She broke off, and with agitated lips looked at Deronda, but the expression on his face pierced her with an entirely new feeling. He was under the baffling difficulty of discerning, that what he had been urging on her was thrown into the pallid distance of mere thought before the outburst of her habitual emotion. It was as if he saw her drowning while his limbs were bound. The pained compa.s.sion which was spread over his features as he watched her, affected her with a compunction unlike any she had felt before, and in a changed and imploring tone she said--

"I am grieving you. I am ungrateful. You _can_ help me. I will think of everything. I will try. Tell me--it will not be a pain to you that I have dared to speak of my trouble to you? You began it, you know, when you rebuked me." There was a melancholy smile on her lips as she said that, but she added more entreatingly, "It will not be a pain to you?"

"Not if it does anything to save you from an evil to come," said Deronda, with strong emphasis; "otherwise, it will be a lasting pain."

"No--no--it shall not be. It may be--it shall be better with me because I have known you." She turned immediately, and quitted the room.

When she was on the first landing of the staircase, Sir Hugo pa.s.sed across the hall on his way to the library, and saw her. Grandcourt was not with him.

Deronda, when the baronet entered, was standing in his ordinary att.i.tude, grasping his coat-collar, with his back to the table, and with that indefinable expression by which we judge that a man is still in the shadow of a scene which he has just gone through. He moved, however, and began to arrange the letters.

"Has Mrs. Grandcourt been in here?" said Sir Hugo.

"Yes, she has."

"Where are the others?"

"I believe she left them somewhere in the grounds."

After a moment's silence, in which Sir Hugo looked at a letter without reading it, he said "I hope you are not playing with fire, Dan--you understand me?"

"I believe I do, sir," said Deronda, after a slight hesitation, which had some repressed anger in it. "But there is nothing answering to your metaphor--no fire, and therefore no chance of scorching."

Sir Hugo looked searchingly at him, and then said, "So much the better.

For, between ourselves, I fancy there may be some hidden gunpowder in that establishment."

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

_Aspern._ Pardon, my lord--I speak for Sigismund.

_Fronsberg._ For him? Oh, ay--for him I always hold A pardon safe in bank, sure he will draw Sooner or later on me. What his need?

Mad project broken? fine mechanic wings That would not fly? durance, a.s.sault on watch, Bill for Epernay, not a crust to eat?

_Aspern._ Oh, none of these, my lord; he has escaped From Circe's herd, and seeks to win the love Of your fair ward Cecilia: but would win First your consent. You frown.

_Fronsberg._ Distinguish words.

I said I held a pardon, not consent.

In spite of Deronda's reasons for wis.h.i.+ng to be in town again--reasons in which his anxiety for Mirah was blent with curiosity to know more of the enigmatic Mordecai--he did not manage to go up before Sir Hugo, who preceded his family that he might be ready for the opening of Parliament on the sixth of February. Deronda took up his quarters in Park Lane, aware that his chambers were sufficiently tenanted by Hans Meyrick. This was what he expected; but he found other things not altogether according to his expectations.

Most of us remember Retzsch's drawing of destiny in the shape of Mephistopheles playing at chess with man for his soul, a game in which we may imagine the clever adversary making a feint of unintended moves so as to set the beguiled mortal on carrying his defensive pieces away from the true point of attack. The fiend makes preparation his favorite object of mockery, that he may fatally persuade us against our taking out waterproofs when he is well aware the sky is going to clear, foreseeing that the imbecile will turn this delusion into a prejudice against waterproofs instead of giving a closer study to the weather-signs. It is a peculiar test of a man's metal when, after he has painfully adjusted himself to what seems a wise provision, he finds all his mental precaution a little beside the mark, and his excellent intentions no better than miscalculated dovetails, accurately cut from a wrong starting-point. His magnanimity has got itself ready to meet misbehavior, and finds quite a different call upon it. Something of this kind happened to Deronda.

His first impression was one of pure pleasure and amus.e.m.e.nt at finding his sitting-room transformed into an _atelier_ strewed with miscellaneous drawings and with the contents of two chests from Rome, the lower half of the windows darkened with baize, and the blonde Hans in his weird youth as the presiding genius of the littered place--his hair longer than of old, his face more whimsically creased, and his high voice as usual getting higher under the excitement of rapid talk.

The friends.h.i.+p of the two had been kept up warmly since the memorable Cambridge time, not only by correspondence but by little episodes of companions.h.i.+p abroad and in England, and the original relation of confidence on one side and indulgence on the other had been developed in practice, as is wont to be the case where such spiritual borrowing and lending has been well begun.

"I knew you would like to see my casts and antiquities," said Hans, after the first hearty greetings and inquiries, "so I didn't scruple to unlade my chests here. But I've found two rooms at Chelsea not many hundred yards from my mother and sisters, and I shall soon be ready to hang out there--when they've sc.r.a.ped the walls and put in some new lights. That's all I'm waiting for. But you see I don't wait to begin work: you can't conceive what a great fellow I'm going to be. The seed of immortality has sprouted within me."

"Only a fungoid growth, I dare say--a growing disease in the lungs,"

said Deronda, accustomed to treat Hans in brotherly fas.h.i.+on. He was walking toward some drawings propped on the ledge of his bookcases; five rapidly-sketched heads--different aspects of the same face. He stood at a convenient distance from them, without making any remark.

Hans, too, was silent for a minute, took up his palette and began touching the picture on his easel.

"What do you think of them?" he said at last.

"The full face looks too ma.s.sive; otherwise the likenesses are good,"

said Deronda, more coldly than was usual with him.

"No, it is not too ma.s.sive," said Hans, decisively. "I have noted that.

There is always a little surprise when one pa.s.ses from the profile to the full face. But I shall enlarge her scale for Berenice. I am making a Berenice series--look at the sketches along there--and now I think of it, you are just the model I want for the Agrippa." Hans, still with pencil and palette in hand, had moved to Deronda's side while he said this, but he added hastily, as if conscious of a mistake, "No, no, I forgot; you don't like sitting for your portrait, confound you!

However, I've picked up a capital t.i.tus. There are to be five in the series. The first is Berenice clasping the knees of Gessius Florus and beseeching him to spare her people; I've got that on the easel. Then, this, where she is standing on the Xystus with Agrippa, entreating the people not to injure themselves by resistance."

"Agrippa's legs will never do," said Deronda.

"The legs are good realistically," said Hans, his face creasing drolly; "public men are often shaky about the legs--' Their legs, the emblem of their various thought,' as somebody says in the 'Rehearsal.'"

"But these are as impossible as the legs of Raphael's Alcibiades," said Deronda.

"Then they are good ideally," said Hans. "Agrippa's legs were possibly bad; I idealize that and make them impossibly bad. Art, my Eugenius, must intensify. But never mind the legs now: the third sketch in the series is Berenice exulting in the prospects of being Empress of Rome, when the news has come that Vespasian is declared Emperor and her lover t.i.tus his successor."

"You must put a scroll in her mouth, else people will not understand that. You can't tell that in a picture."

"It will make them feel their ignorance then--an excellent aesthetic effect. The fourth is, t.i.tus sending Berenice away from Rome after she has shared his palace for ten years--both reluctant, both sad--_invitus invitam_, as Suetonius hath it. I've found a model for the Roman brute."

"Shall you make Berenice look fifty? She must have been that."

"No, no; a few mature touches to show the lapse of time. Dark-eyed beauty wears well, hers particularly. But now, here is the fifth: Berenice seated lonely on the ruins of Jerusalem. That is pure imagination. That is what ought to have been--perhaps was. Now, see how I tell a pathetic negative. n.o.body knows what became of her--that is finely indicated by the series coming to a close. There is no sixth picture." Here Hans pretended to speak with a gasping sense of sublimity, and drew back his head with a frown, as if looking for a like impression on Deronda. "I break off in the Homeric style. The story is chipped off, so to speak, and pa.s.ses with a ragged edge into nothing--_le neant_; can anything be more sublime, especially in French? The vulgar would desire to see her corpse and burial--perhaps her will read and her linen distributed. But now come and look at this on the easel. I have made some way there."

"That beseeching att.i.tude is really good," said Deronda, after a moment's contemplation. "You have been very industrious in the Christmas holidays; for I suppose you have taken up the subject since you came to London." Neither of them had yet mentioned Mirah.

"No," said Hans, putting touches to his picture, "I made up my mind to the subject before. I take that lucky chance for an augury that I am going to burst on the world as a great painter. I saw a splendid woman in the Trastevere--the grandest women there are half Jewesses--and she set me hunting for a fine situation of a Jewess at Rome. Like other men of vast learning, I ended by taking what lay on the surface. I'll show you a sketch of the Trasteverina's head when I can lay my hands on it."

"I should think she would be a more suitable model for Berenice," said Deronda, not knowing exactly how to express his discontent.

"Not a bit of it. The model ought to be the most beautiful Jewess in the world, and I have found her."

"Have you made yourself sure that she would like to figure in that character? I should think no woman would be more abhorrent to her. Does she quite know what you are doing?"

"Certainly. I got her to throw herself precisely into this att.i.tude.

Little mother sat for Gessius Florus, and Mirah clasped her knees."

Here Hans went a little way off and looked at the effect of his touches.

"I dare say she knows nothing about Berenice's history," said Deronda, feeling more indignation than he would have been able to justify.