“God bless you, child!” said Mrs. Meyrick, the words escaping involuntarily from her motherly heart. But to relieve the strain of feeling she looked at Deronda and said, “It is curious that Mirah, who remembers her mother so well it is as if she saw her, cannot recall her brother the least bit—except the feeling of having been carried by him when she was tired, and of his being near her when she was in her mother’s lap. It must be that he was rarely at home. He was already grown up. It is a pity her brother should be quite a stranger to her.”
“He is good; I feel sure Ezra is good,” said Mirah, eagerly. “He loved my mother—he would take care of her. I remember more of him than that. I remember my mother’s voice once calling, ‘Ezra!’ and then his answering from a distance ‘Mother!’”—Mirah had changed her voice a little in each of these words and had given them a loving intonation—“and then he came close to us. I feel sure he is good. I have always taken comfort from that.”
It was impossible to answer this either with agreement or doubt. Mrs. Meyrick and Deronda exchanged a quick glance: about this brother she felt as painfully dubious as he did. But Mirah went on, absorbed in her memories,
“Is it not wonderful how I remember the voices better than anything else? I think they must go deeper into us than other things. I have often fancied heaven might be made of voices.”
“Like your singing—yes,” said Mab, who had hitherto kept a modest silence, and now spoke bashfully, as was her wont in the presence of Prince Camaralzaman—“Ma, do ask Mirah to sing. Mr. Deronda has not heard her.”
“Would it be disagreeable to you to sing now?” said Deronda, with a more deferential gentleness than he had ever been conscious of before.
“Oh, I shall like it,” said Mirah. “My voice has come back a little with rest.”
Perhaps her ease of manner was due to something more than the simplicity of her nature. The circumstances of her life made her think of everything she did as work demanded from her, in which affectation had nothing to do; and she had begun her work before self-consciousness was born.
She immediately rose and went to the piano—a somewhat worn instrument that seemed to get the better of its infirmities under the firm touch of her small fingers as she preluded. Deronda placed himself where he could see her while she sang; and she took everything as quietly as if she had been a child going to breakfast.
Imagine her—it is always good to imagine a human creature in whom bodily loveliness seems as properly one with the entire being as the bodily loveliness of those wondrous transparent orbs of life that we find in the sea—imagine her with her dark hair brushed from her temples, but yet showing certain tiny rings there which had cunningly found their own way back, the mass of it hanging behind just to the nape of the little neck in curly fibres, such as renew themselves at their own will after being bathed into straightness like that of water-grasses. Then see the perfect cameo her profile makes, cut in a duskish shell, where by some happy fortune there pierced a gem-like darkness for the eye and eyebrow; the delicate nostrils defined enough to be ready for sensitive movements, the finished ear, the firm curves of the chin and neck, entering into the expression of a refinement which was not feebleness.