“I agree with Mirah,” said Mrs. Meyrick. “Saint Anybody is a bad saint to pray to.”
“Besides, Anybody could not have brought me to you,” said Mirah, smiling at Mrs. Meyrick. “And I would rather be with you than with any one else in the world except my mother. I wonder if ever a poor little bird, that was lost and could not fly, was taken and put into a warm nest where was a mother and sisters who took to it so that everything came naturally, as if it had been always there. I hardly thought before that the world could ever be as happy and without fear as it is to me now.” She looked meditative a moment, and then said, “sometimes I am a little afraid.”
“What is it you are afraid of?” said Deronda with anxiety.
“That when I am turning at the corner of a street I may meet my father. It seems dreadful that I should be afraid of meeting him. That is my only sorrow,” said Mirah, plaintively.
“It is surely not very probable,” said Deronda, wishing that it were less so; then, not to let the opportunity escape—“Would it be a great grief to you now if you were never to meet your mother?”
She did not answer immediately, but meditated again, with her eyes fixed on the opposite wall. Then she turned them on Deronda and said firmly, as if she had arrived at the exact truth, “I want her to know that I have always loved her, and if she is alive I want to comfort her. She may be dead. If she were I should long to know where she was buried; and to know whether my brother lives, to say Kaddish in memory of her. But I will try not to grieve. I have thought much for so many years of her being dead. And I shall have her with me in my mind, as I have always had. We can never be really parted. I think I have never sinned against her. I have always tried not to do what would hurt her. Only, she might be sorry that I was not a good Jewess.”
“In what way are you not a good Jewess?” said Deronda.
“I am ignorant, and we never observed the laws, but lived among Christians just as they did. But I have heard my father laugh at the strictness of the Jews about their food and all customs, and their not liking Christians. I think my mother was strict; but she could never want me not to like those who are better to me than any of my own people I have ever known. I think I could obey in other things that she wished but not in that. It is so much easier to me to share in love than in hatred. I remember a play I read in German—since I have been here it has come into my mind—where the heroine says something like that.”
“Antigone,” said Deronda.
“Ah, you know it. But I do not believe that my mother would wish me not to love my best friends. She would be grateful to them.” Here Mirah had turned to Mrs. Meyrick, and with a sudden lighting up of her whole countenance, she said, “Oh, if we ever do meet and know each other as we are now, so that I could tell what would comfort her—I should be so full of blessedness my soul would know no want but to love her!”