Deronda tried to hide his pained feeling, and said, “Anything else that I should desire to know from you could only be what it is some satisfaction to your own feeling to tell me.”
“I think I have told you everything that could be demanded of me,” said the Princess, looking coldly meditative. It seemed as if she had exhausted her emotion in their former interview. The fact was, she had said to herself, “I have done it all. I have confessed all. I will not go through it again. I will save myself from agitation.” And she was acting out that scheme.
But to Deronda’s nature the moment was cruel; it made the filial yearning of his life a disappointed pilgrimage to a shrine where there were no longer the symbols of sacredness. It seemed that all the woman lacking in her was present in him, as he said, with some tremor in his voice,
“Then are we to part and I never be anything to you?”
“It is better so,” said the Princess, in a softer, mellower voice. “There could be nothing but hard duty for you, even if it were possible for you to take the place of my son. You would not love me. Don’t deny it,” she said, abruptly, putting up her hand. “I know what is the truth. You don’t like what I did. You are angry with me. You think I robbed you of something. You are on your grandfather’s side, and you will always have a condemnation of me in your heart.”
Deronda felt himself under a ban of silence. He rose from his seat by her, preferring to stand, if he had to obey that imperious prohibition of any tenderness. But his mother now looked up at him with a new admiration in her glance, saying,
“You are wrong to be angry with me. You are the better for what I did.” After pausing a little, she added, abruptly, “And now tell me what you shall do?”
“Do you mean now, immediately,” said Deronda; “or as to the course of my future life?”
“I mean in the future. What difference will it make to you that I have told you about your birth?”
“A very great difference,” said Deronda, emphatically. “I can hardly think of anything that would make a greater difference.”