DANIEL DERONDA (Completed)

Chapter 48

'Tis hard and ill-paid task to order all things beforehand by the rule

of our own security, as is well hinted by Machiavelli concerning

Caesar Borgia, who, saith he, had thought of all that might occur on

his father's death, and had provided against every evil chance save

only one: it had never come into his mind that when his father died,

his own death would quickly follow.

Grandcourt's importance as a subject of this realm was of the grandly

passive kind which consists in the inheritance of land. Political and

social movements touched him only through the wire of his rental, and his

most careful biographer need not have read up on Schleswig-Holstein, the

policy of Bismarck, trade-unions, household suffrage, or even the last

commercial panic. He glanced over the best newspaper columns on these

topics, and his views on them can hardly be said to have wanted breadth,

since he embraced all Germans, all commercial men, and all voters liable

to use the wrong kind of soap, under the general epithet of "brutes;" but

he took no action on these much-agitated questions beyond looking from

under his eyelids at any man who mentioned them, and retaining a silence

which served to shake the opinions of timid thinkers.

But Grandcourt, within his own sphere of interest, showed some of the

qualities which have entered into triumphal diplomacy of the wildest

continental sort.

No movement of Gwendolen in relation to Deronda escaped him. He would have

denied that he was jealous; because jealousy would have implied some doubt

of his own power to hinder what he had determined against. That his wife

should have more inclination to another man's society than to his own

would not pain him: what he required was that she should be as fully aware

as she would have been of a locked hand-cuff, that her inclination was

helpless to decide anything in contradiction with his resolve. However

much of vacillating whim there might have been in his entrance on

matrimony, there was no vacillating in his interpretation of the bond. He

had not repented of his marriage; it had really brought more of aim into

his life, new objects to exert his will upon; and he had not repented of

his choice. His taste was fastidious, and Gwendolen satisfied it: he would

not have liked a wife who had not received some elevation of rank from

him; nor one who did not command admiration by her mien and beauty; nor

one whose nails were not of the right shape; nor one the lobe of whose ear

was at all too large and red; nor one who, even if her nails and ears were