Deronda colored and said, "My reasons would be independent of any such fact."
"I know better. I have seen what men are," said the Princess, peremptorily. "Tell me the truth. She is a Jewess who will not accept any one but a Jew. There are a few such," she added, with a touch of scorn.
Deronda had that objection to answer which we all have known in speaking to those who are too certain of their own fixed interpretations to be enlightened by anything we may say. But besides this, the point immediately in question was one on which he felt a repugnance either to deny or affirm. He remained silent, and she presently said-"You love her as your father loved me, and she draws you after her as I drew him."
Those words touched Deronda's filial imagination, and some tenderness in his glance was taken by his mother as an assent. She went on with rising passion: "But I was leading him the other way. And now your grandfather is getting his revenge."
"Mother," said Deronda, remonstrantly, "don't let us think of it in that way. I will admit that there may come some benefit from the education you chose for me. I prefer cherishing the benefit with gratitude, to dwelling with resentment on the injury. I think it would have been right that I should have been brought up with the consciousness that I was a Jew, but it must always have been a good to me to have as wide an instruction and sympathy as possible. And now, you have restored me my inheritance--events have brought a fuller restitution than you could have made--you have been saved from robbing my people of my service and me of my duty: can you not bring your whole soul to consent to this?"
Deronda paused in his pleading: his mother looked at him listeningly, as if the cadence of his voice were taking her ear, yet she shook her head slowly. He began again, even more urgently.
"You have told me that you sought what you held the best for me: open your heart to relenting and love toward my grandfather, who sought what he held the best for you."
"Not for me, no," she said, shaking her head with more absolute denial, and folding her arms tightly. "I tell you, he never thought of his daughter except as an instrument. Because I had wants outside his purpose, I was to be put in a frame and tortured. If that is the right law for the world, I will not say that I love it. If my acts were wrong--if it is God who is exacting from me that I should deliver up what I withheld--who is punishing me because I deceived my father and did not warn him that I should contradict his trust--well, I have told everything. I have done what I could. And your soul consents. That is enough. I have after all been the instrument my father wanted.--'I desire a grandson who shall have a true Jewish heart. Every Jew should rear his family as if he hoped that a Deliverer might spring from it.'"