his strength. "You see that I am
dying. You see that I am as one shut up behind bars by the wayside, who
if he spoke to any would be met only by head-shaking and pity. The day
is closing--the light is fading--soon we should not have been able to
discern each other. But you have come in time."

"I rejoice that I am come in time," said Deronda, feelingly. He would
not say, "I hope you are not mistaken in me,"--the very word
"mistaken," he thought, would be a cruelty at that moment.

"But the hidden reasons why I need you began afar off," said Mordecai;
"began in my early years when I was studying in another land. Then
ideas, beloved ideas, came to me, because I was a Jew. They were a
trust to fulfill, because I was a Jew. They were an inspiration,
because I was a Jew, and felt the heart of my race beating within me.
They were my life; I was not fully born till then. I counted this
heart, and this breath, and this right hand"--Mordecai had pathetically
pressed his hand upon his breast, and then stretched its wasted fingers
out before him--"I counted my sleep and my waking, and the work I fed
my body with, and the sights that fed my eyes--I counted them but as
fuel to the divine flame. But I had done as one who wanders and
engraves his thought in rocky solitudes, and before I could change my
course came care and labor and disease, and blocked the way before me,
and bound me with the iron that eats itself into the soul. Then I said,
'How shall I save the life within me from being stifled with this
stifled breath?'"

Mordecai paused to rest that poor breath which had been taxed by the
rising excitement of his speech. And also he wished to check that
excitement. Deronda dared not speak the very silence in the narrow
space seemed alive with mingled awe and compassion before this
struggling fervor. And presently Mordecai went on--

"But you may misunderstand me. I speak not as an ignorant dreamer--as
one bred up in the inland valleys, thinking ancient thoughts anew, and
not knowing them ancient, never having stood by the great waters where
the world's knowledge passes to and fro. English is my mother-tongue,
England is the native land of this body, which is but as a breaking pot
of earth around the fruit-bearing tree, whose seed might make the
desert rejoice. But my true life was nourished in Holland at the feet
of my mother's brother, a Rabbi skilled in special learning: and when
he died I went to Hamburg to study, and aft