“Ah, the dear head, the dear head!” said Mordecai, in a low loving tone, laying his thin hand gently on the curls.
“You are very ill, Ezra,” said Mirah, sadly looking at him with more observation.
“Yes, dear child, I shall not be long with you in the body,” was the quiet answer.
“Oh, I will love you and we will talk to each other,” said Mirah, with a sweet outpouring of her words, as spontaneous as bird-notes. “I will tell you everything, and you will teach me:—you will teach me to be a good Jewess—what she would have liked me to be. I shall always be with you when I am not working. For I work now. I shall get money to keep us. Oh, I have had such good friends.”
Mirah until now had quite forgotten that any one was by, but here she turned with the prettiest attitude, keeping one hand on her brother’s arm while she looked at Mrs. Meyrick and Deronda. The little mother’s happy emotion in witnessing this meeting of brother and sister had already won her to Mordecai, who seemed to her really to have more dignity and refinement than she had felt obliged to believe in from Deronda’s account.
“See this dear lady!” said Mirah. “I was a stranger, a poor wanderer, and she believed in me, and has treated me as a daughter. Please give my brother your hand,” she added, beseechingly, taking Mrs. Meyrick’s hand and putting it in Mordecai’s, then pressing them both with her own and lifting them to her lips.
“The Eternal Goodness has been with you,” said Mordecai. “You have helped to fulfill our mother’s prayer.”
“I think we will go now, shall we?—and return later,” said Deronda, laying a gentle pressure on Mrs. Meyrick’s arm, and she immediately complied. He was afraid of any reference to the facts about himself which he had kept back from Mordecai, and he felt no uneasiness now in the thought of the brother and sister being alone together.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
’Tis hard and ill-paid task to order all things beforehand by the rule of our own security, as is well hinted by Machiavelli concerning Cæsar Borgia, who, saith he, had thought of all that might occur on his father’s death, and had provided against every evil chance save only one: it had never come into his mind that when his father died, his own death would quickly follow.