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But she was not satisfied with defending this thesis, beneficial, comparatively simple, and, in the situations which it suggests, not unfriendly to art. In her last book, Daniel Deronda, she embarked on a scheme, equally hopeless and gratuitous, of endeavouring to enlist the public sympathies in certain visions of neo-Judaism.
Mordecai, with a sudden start, laid a spasmodic grasp on Deronda's wrist; there was a great terror in him. And Deronda divined it. A tremor was perceptible in his clear tones as he said "What was prayed for has come to pass: Mirah has been delivered from evil." Mordecai's grasp relaxed a little, but he was panting with a tearless sob.
Even Deronda had no place in her consciousness at that moment. He was completely unmanned.
His grasp had become convulsive in its force, and Deronda, agitated as he had never been before the certainty that this was Mirah's brother suffusing his own strange relation to Mordecai with a new solemnity and tenderness felt his strong young heart beating faster and his lips paling. He shrank from speech.
The art of fiction has nothing more elevated, or more touching, or fairer to every variety of religious experience, than the delineation of the motives that actuated Dinah Morris the Methodist preacher, Deronda the Jew, Dorothea the Puritan, Adam and Seth Bede, and Janet Dempster.
I hold that my first duty is to my own people, and if there is anything to be done toward restoring or perfecting their common life, I shall make that my vocation." It happened to Deronda at that moment, as it has often happened to others, that the need for speech made an epoch in resolve.
If further intercourse revealed nothing but illusions as what he was expected to share in, the want of any valid evidence that he was a Jew might save Mordecai the worst shock in the refusal of fraternity. It might even be justifiable to use the uncertainty on this point in keeping up a suspense which would induce Mordecai to accept those offices of friendship that Deronda longed to urge on him.
"Will you allow me to come again and inquire perhaps at five to-morrow?" he said to Mrs. Meyrick. "Yes, pray; we shall have had time to make acquaintance then." "Good-bye," said Deronda, looking down at Mirah, and putting out his hand. She rose as she took it, and the moment brought back to them both strongly the other moment when she had first taken that outstretched hand.
"No," said Deronda, "I have lately, before I had any true suspicion of my parentage, been led to study everything belonging to their history with more interest than any other subject. It turns out that I have been making myself ready to understand my grandfather a little."
After a moment's pause he said to Deronda "Do you know those people the Langens?" "I have talked with them a little since Miss Harleth went away. I knew nothing of them before." "Where is she gone do you know?" "She is gone home," said Deronda, coldly, as if he wished to say no more.
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