. He would have sealed
his mind against such constructions if it had been possible, and he had never
yet fully admitted to himself that he wished the facts to verify Mordecai's
conviction: he inwardly repeated that he had no choice in the matter, and that
wishing was folly - nay, on the question of parentage, wishing seemed part of
that meanness which disowns kinship: it was a disowning by anticipation. What he
had to do was simply to accept the fact; and he had really no strong presumption
to go upon, now that he was assured of his mistake about Sir Hugo. There had
been a resolved concealment which made all inference untrustworthy, and the very
name he bore might be a false one. If Mordecai were wrong - if he, the so-called
Daniel Deronda, were held by ties entirely aloof from any such course as his
friend's pathetic hope had marked out? - he would not say »I wish;« but he could
not help feeling on which side the sacrifice lay.
    Across these two importunate thoughts, which he resisted as much as one can
resist anything in that unstrung condition which belongs to suspense, there came
continually an anxiety which he made no effort to banish - dwelling on it rather
with a mournfulness, which often seems to us the best atonement we can make to
one whose need we have been unable to meet. The anxiety was for Gwendolen. In
the wonderful mixtures of our nature there is a feeling distinct from that
exclusive passionate love of which some men and women (by no means all) are
capable, which yet is not the same with friendship, nor with a merely benevolent
regard, whether admiring or compassionate: a man, say - for it is a man who is
here concerned - hardly represents to himself this shade of feeling towards a
woman more nearly than in the words, »I should have loved her, if --:« the »if«
covering some prior growth in the inclinations, or else some circumstances which
have made an inward prohibitory law as a stay against the emotions ready to
quiver out of balance. The »if« in Deronda's case carried reasons of both kinds;
yet he had never throughout his relations with Gwendolen been free from the
nervous consciousness that there was something to guard against not only on her
account but on his own - some precipitancy in the manifestation of impulsive
feeling - some ruinous inroad of what is but momentary on the permanent chosen
treasure of the heart - some spoiling of her trust, which wrought upon him now
as if it had been the retreating cry of a
