Daniel Deronda George Eliot (best book clubs TXT) 📖

old, and were sitting on his foot. He declared that he would pay money to have such a boy. I had not meditated much on the plan beforehand, but as soon as I had spoken about it, it took possession of me as something I could not rest without doing. At first he thought I was not serious, but I convinced him, and he was never surprised at anything. He agreed that it would be for your good, and the finest thing for you. A great singer and actress is a queen, but she gives no royalty to her son. All that happened at Naples. And afterward I made Sir Hugo the trustee of your fortune. That is what I did; and I had a joy in doing it. My father had tyrannized over me⁠—he cared more about a grandson to come than he did about me: I counted as nothing. You were to be such a Jew as he; you were to be what he wanted. But you were my son, and it was my turn to say what you should be. I said you should not know you were a Jew.”

“And for months events have been preparing me to be glad that I am a Jew,” said Deronda, his opposition roused again. The point touched the quick of his experience. “It would always have been better that I should have known the truth. I have always been rebelling against the secrecy that looked like shame. It is no shame to have Jewish parents⁠—the shame is to disown it.”

“You say it was a shame to me, then, that I used that secrecy,” said his mother, with a flash of new anger. “There is no shame attaching to me. I have no reason to be ashamed. I rid myself of the Jewish tatters and gibberish that make people nudge each other at sight of us, as if we were tattooed under our clothes, though our faces are as whole as theirs. I delivered you from the pelting contempt that pursues Jewish separateness. I am not ashamed that I did it. It was the better for you.”

“Then why have you now undone the secrecy?⁠—no, not undone it⁠—the effects will never be undone. But why have you now sent for me to tell me that I am a Jew?” said Deronda, with an intensity of opposition in feeling that was almost bitter. It seemed as if her words had called out a latent obstinacy of race in him.

“Why?⁠—ah, why?” said the Princess, rising quickly and walking to the other side of the room, where she turned round and slowly approached him, as he, too, stood up. Then she began to speak again in a more veiled voice. “I can’t explain; I can only say what is. I don’t love my father’s religion now any more than I did then. Before I married the second time I was baptized; I made myself like the people I lived among. I had a right to do it; I was not like a brute, obliged to go with my own herd. I have not repented; I will not say that I have repented. But yet”⁠—here she had come near to her son, and paused; then again retreated a little and stood still, as if resolute not to give way utterly to an imperious influence; but, as she went on speaking, she became more and more unconscious of anything but the awe that subdued her voice. “It is illness, I don’t doubt that it has been gathering illness⁠—my mind has gone back: more than a year ago it began. You see my gray hair, my worn look: it has all come fast. Sometimes I am in an agony of pain⁠—I dare say I shall be tonight. Then it is as if all the life I have chosen to live, all thoughts, all will, forsook me and left me alone in spots of memory, and I can’t get away: my pain seems to keep me there. My childhood⁠—my girlhood⁠—the day of my marriage⁠—the day of my father’s death⁠—there seems to be nothing since. Then a great horror comes over me: what do I know of life or death? and what my father called ‘right’ may be a power that is laying hold of me⁠—that is clutching me now. Well, I will satisfy him. I cannot go into the darkness without satisfying him. I have hidden what was his. I thought once I would burn it. I have not burned it. I thank God I have not burned it!”

She threw herself on her cushions again, visibly fatigued. Deronda, moved too strongly by her suffering for other impulses to act within him, drew near her, and said, entreatingly,

“Will you not spare yourself this evening? Let us leave the rest till tomorrow.”

“No,” she said decisively. “I will confess it all, now that I have come up to it. Often when I am at ease it all fades away; my whole self comes quite back; but I know it will sink away again, and the other will come⁠—the poor, solitary, forsaken remains of self, that can resist nothing. It was my nature to resist, and say, ‘I have a right to resist.’ Well, I say so still when I have any strength in me. You have heard me say it, and I don’t withdraw it. But when my strength goes, some other right forces itself upon me like iron in an inexorable hand; and even when I am at ease, it is beginning to make ghosts upon the daylight. And now you have made it worse for me,” she said, with a sudden return of impetuosity; “but I shall have told you everything. And what reproach is there against me,” she added bitterly, “since I have made you glad to be a Jew? Joseph Kalonymos reproached me: he said you had been turned into a proud Englishman, who resented being touched by a Jew. I wish you had!” she ended, with a