shall take the inheritance; it has been
gathering for ages. The generations are crowding on my narrow life as a bridge:
what has been and what is to be are meeting there; and the bridge is breaking.
But I have found you. You have come in time. You will take the inheritance which
the base son refuses because of the tombs which the plough and harrow may not
pass over or the gold-seeker disturb: you will take the sacred inheritance of
the Jew.«
    Deronda had become as pallid as Mordecai. Quick as an alarm of flood or
fire, there spread within him not only a compassionate dread of discouraging
this fellow-man who urged a prayer as of one in the last agony, but also the
opposing dread of fatally feeding an illusion, and being hurried on to a
self-committal which might turn into a falsity. The peculiar appeal to his
tenderness overcame the repulsion that most of us experience under a grasp and
speech which assume to dominate. The difficulty to him was to inflict the
accents of hesitation and doubt on this ardent suffering creature, who was
crowding too much of his brief being into a moment of perhaps extravagant trust.
With exquisite instinct, Deronda, before he opened his lips, placed his palm
gently on Mordecai's straining hand - an act just then equal to many speeches.
And after that he said, without haste, as if conscious that he might be wrong -
    »Do you forget what I told you when we first saw each other? Do you remember
that I said I was not of your race?«
    »It can't be true,« Mordecai whispered immediately, with no sign of shock.
The sympathetic hand still upon him had fortified the feeling which was stronger
than those words of denial. There was a perceptible pause, Deronda feeling it
impossible to answer, conscious indeed that the assertion, It can't be true -
had the pressure of argument for him. Mordecai, too entirely possessed by the
supreme importance of the relation between himself and Deronda to have any other
care in his speech, followed up that assertion by a second, which came to his
lips as a mere sequence of his long-cherished conviction -
    »You are not sure of your own origin.«
    »How do you know that?« said Daniel, with an habitual shrinking which made
him remove his hand from Mordecai's, who also relaxed his hold, and fell back
into his former leaning position.
    »I know it - I know it; what is my life else?« said Mordecai, with a low