decai'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 hands 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
cry of impatience. "Tell me everything: tell me why you deny?"

He could have no conception what that demand was to the hearer--how
probingly it touched the hidden sensibility, the vividly conscious
reticence of years; how the uncertainty he was insisting on as part of
his own hope had always for Daniel been a threatening possibility of
painful revelation about his mother. But the moment had influences
which were not only new but solemn to Deronda; any evasion here might
turn out to be a hateful refusal of some task that belonged to him,
some act of due fellowship; in any case it would be a cruel rebuff to a
being who was appealing to him as a forlorn hope under the shadow of a
coming doom. After a few moments, he said, with a great effort over
himself--determined to tell all the truth briefly--

"I have never known my mother. I have no knowledge about her. I have
never called any man father. But I am convinced that my father is an
Englishman."

Deronda's deep tones had a tremor in them as he uttered this
confession; and all the while there was an undercurrent of amazement in
him at the strange circumstances under which he uttered it. It seemed
as if Mordecai were hardly overrating his own power to determine the
action of the friend whom he had mysteriously chosen.