Daniel Deronda - George Eliot (best romance books of all time txt) 📗

with a lunatic, especially if he wanted defending. You have a passion for people who are pelted, Dan. I’m sorry for them too; but so far as company goes, it’s a bad ground of selection. However, I don’t ask you to anticipate your inclination in anything you have to tell me. When you make up your mind to a course that requires money, I have some sixteen thousand pounds that have been accumulating for you over and above what you have been having the interest of as income. And now I am come, I suppose you want to get back to England as soon as you can?”

“I must go first to Mainz to get away a chest of my grandfather’s, and perhaps to see a friend of his,” said Deronda. “Although the chest has been lying there these twenty years, I have an unreasonable sort of nervous eagerness to get it away under my care, as if it were more likely now than before that something might happen to it. And perhaps I am the more uneasy, because I lingered after my mother left, instead of setting out immediately. Yet I can’t regret that I was here⁠—else Mrs. Grandcourt would have had none but servants to act for her.”

“Yes, yes,” said Sir Hugo, with a flippancy which was an escape of some vexation hidden under his more serious speech; “I hope you are not going to set a dead Jew above a living Christian.”

Deronda colored, and repressed a retort. They were just turning into the Italia.

LX

But I shall say no more of this at this time; for this is to be felt and not to be talked of; and they who never touched it with their fingers may secretly perhaps laugh at it in their hearts and be never the wiser.

—⁠Jeremy Taylor.

The Roman Emperor in the legend put to death ten learned Israelites to avenge the sale of Joseph by his brethren. And there have always been enough of his kidney, whose piety lies in punishing who can see the justice of grudges but not of gratitude. For you shall never convince the stronger feeling that it hath not the stronger reason, or incline him who hath no love to believe that there is good ground for loving. As we may learn from the order of word-making, wherein love precedeth lovable.

When Deronda presented his letter at the banking-house in the Schuster Strasse at Mainz, and asked for Joseph Kalonymos, he was presently shown into an inner room, where, seated at a table arranging open letters, was the white-bearded man whom he had seen the year before in the synagogue at Frankfort. He wore his hat⁠—it seemed to be the same old felt hat as before⁠—and near him was a packed portmanteau with a wrap and overcoat upon it. On seeing Deronda enter he rose, but did not advance or put out his hand. Looking at him with small penetrating eyes which glittered like black gems in the midst of his yellowish face and white hair, he said in German,

“Good! It is now you who seek me, young man.”

“Yes; I seek you with gratitude, as a friend of my grandfather’s,” said Deronda, “and I am under an obligation to you for giving yourself much trouble on my account.” He spoke without difficulty in that liberal German tongue which takes many strange accents to its maternal bosom.

Kalonymos now put out his hand and said cordially, “So you are no longer angry at being something more than an Englishman?”

“On the contrary. I thank you heartily for helping to save me from remaining in ignorance of my parentage, and for taking care of the chest that my grandfather left in trust for me.”

“Sit down, sit down,” said Kalonymos, in a quick undertone, seating himself again, and pointing to a chair near him. Then deliberately laying aside his hat and showing a head thickly covered, with white hair, he stroked and clutched his beard while he looked examiningly at the young face before him. The moment wrought strongly on Deronda’s imaginative susceptibility: in the presence of one linked still in zealous friendship with the grandfather whose hope had yearned toward him when he was unborn, and who, though dead, was yet to speak with him in those written memorials which, says Milton, “contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are,” he seemed to himself to be touching the electric chain of his own ancestry; and he bore the scrutinizing look of Kalonymos with a delighted awe, something like what one feels in the solemn commemoration of acts done long ago but still telling markedly on the life of today. Impossible for men of duller fibre⁠—men whose affection is not ready to diffuse itself through the wide travel of imagination, to comprehend, perhaps even to credit this sensibility of Deronda’s; but it subsisted, like their own dullness, notwithstanding their lack of belief in it⁠—and it gave his face an expression which seemed very satisfactory to the observer.

He said in Hebrew, quoting from one of the fine hymns in the Hebrew liturgy, “As thy goodness has been great to the former generations, even so may it be to the latter.” Then after pausing a little he began, “Young man, I rejoice that I was not yet set off again on my travels, and that you are come in time for me to see the image of my friend as he was in his youth⁠—no longer perverted from the fellowship of your people⁠—no longer shrinking in proud wrath from the touch of him who seemed to be claiming you as a Jew. You come with thankfulness yourself to claim the kindred and heritage that wicked contrivance would have robbed you of. You come with a willing soul to declare, ‘I am the grandson of Daniel Charisi.’ Is it not so?”

“Assuredly it is,” said Deronda. “But let me say that I should at