“Why, she is made for you then. Sir Hugo said you were bitterly against being a singer, and I can see that you would never have let yourself be merged in a wife, as your father was.”
“I repeat,” said Deronda, emphatically—“I repeat that I have no assurance of her love for me, of the possibility that we can ever be united. Other things—painful issues may lie before me. I have always felt that I should prepare myself to renounce, not cherish that prospect. But I suppose I might feel so of happiness in general. Whether it may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.”
“Do you feel in that way?” said his mother, laying her hands on his shoulders, and perusing his face, while she spoke in a low meditative tone, pausing between her sentences. “Poor boy!——I wonder how it would have been if I had kept you with me——whether you would have turned your heart to the old things against mine——and we should have quarreled——your grandfather would have been in you——and you would have hampered my life with your young growth from the old root.”
“I think my affection might have lasted through all our quarreling,” said Deronda, saddened more and more, “and that would not have hampered—surely it would have enriched your life.”
“Not then, not then——I did not want it then——I might have been glad of it now,” said the mother, with a bitter melancholy, “if I could have been glad of anything.”
“But you love your other children, and they love you?” said Deronda, anxiously.
“Oh, yes,” she answered, as to a question about a matter of course, while she folded her arms again. “But,”——she added in a deeper tone,——“I am not a loving woman. That is the truth. It is a talent to love—I lack it. Others have loved me—and I have acted their love. I know very well what love makes of men and women—it is subjection. It takes another for a larger self, enclosing this one,”—she pointed to her own bosom. “I was never willingly subject to any man. Men have been subject to me.”
“Perhaps the man who was subject was the happier of the two,” said Deronda—not with a smile, but with a grave, sad sense of his mother’s privation.
“Perhaps—but I was happy—for a few years I was happy. If I had not been afraid of defeat and failure, I might have gone on. I miscalculated. What then? It is all over. Another life! Men talk of ‘another life,’ as if it only began on the other side of the grave. I have long entered on another life.” With the last words she raised her arms till they were bare to the elbow, her brow was contracted in one deep fold, her eyes were closed, her voice was smothered: in her dusky flame-colored garment, she looked like a dreamed visitant from some region of departed mortals.
Deronda’s feeling was wrought to a pitch of acuteness in which he was no longer quite master of himself. He gave an audible sob. His mother opened her eyes, and letting her hands again rest on his shoulders, said,