 6 Thus half against his will Alan Merrick was drawn into this irregular compact. Next came that more difficult matter, the discussion of ways and means, the more practical details. Alan hardly knew at first on what precise terms it was Herminia's wish that they too should pass their lives together. His ideas were all naturally framed on the old model of marriage. In that matter Herminia said he was still in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity. He took it for granted that of course they must dwell under one roof with one another. But that simple ancestral notion, derived from man's lordship in his own house, was wholly adverse to Herminia's views of the reasonable and natural. She had debated these problems at full in her own mind for years, and had arrived at definite and consistent solutions for every knotty point in them. Why should this friendship differ at all, she asked, in respect of time and place, from any other friendship? The notion of necessarily keeping house together, the cramping idea of the family tie, belonged entirely to the regime of the man-made patriarchate, where the woman and the children were the slaves and chattels of the lord and master. In a free society was it not obvious that each woman would live her own life apart, would preserve her independence, and would receive the visits of the man for whom she cared, the father of her children. Then only could she be free. Any other method meant the economic and social superiority of the man, and was irreconcilable with the perfect individuality of the woman. So Herminia reasoned. She rejected at once, therefore, the idea of any change in her existing mode of life. To her, the friendship she proposed with Alan Merrick was no social revolution. It was but the due fulfilment of her natural functions. To make of it an occasion for ostentatious change in her way of living seemed to her as unnatural as is the practice of the barbarians in our midst who use a wedding, that most sacred and private event in a young girl's life as an opportunity for display of the coarsest and crudest character. To rivet the attention of friends on bride and bridegroom is to offend against the most delicate susceptibilities of modesty. From all such hateful practices, Herminia's pure mind revolted by instinct. She felt that here at least was the one moment in a woman's history when she would shrink with timid reserve from every eye save one man's, when publicity of any sort was most odious and horrible. Only the blinding effect of custom indeed could ever have shut good women's eyes to the shameful and decorousness of wedding ceremonial. We drag a young girl before the prying gaze of all the world at the very crisis in her life when natural modesty would most lead her to conceal herself from her dearest acquaintance. And our women themselves have grown so blunted by use to the hatefulness of the ordeal that many of them face it now within human effrontery. Familiarity with marriage has almost killed out in the maidens of our race the last lingering relics of native modesty. Herminia, however, could dispense with all that show. She had a little cottage of her own, she told Alan, a tiny little cottage in a street near her school-work. She rented it for a small sum in quite a poor quarter all inhabited by work-people. There she lived by herself, for she kept no servants. There she should continue to live. Why need this purely personal compact between them to make any difference in her daily habits? She would go on with her school-work for the present as usual. Oh, no! she certainly didn't incend to notify the headmistress of the school or anyone else of her altered position. It was no alteration of position at all so far as she was concerned, merely the addition to life of a new and very dear and natural friendship. Herminia took her own point of view so instinctively indeed, lived so wrapped in an ideal world of her own and the futures, that Alan was often quite alarmed in his soul when he thought of the rude awakening that no doubt awaited her. Yet whenever he hinted it to her with all possible delicacy, she seemed so perfectly prepared for the worst the world could do, so fixed and resolved in her intention of martyrdom, that he had no argument left and could only sigh over her. It was not, she explained to him further, that she wished to conceal anything. The least tinge of concealment was wholly alien to that frank, fresh nature. If her headmistress asked her a point-blank question, she would not attempt to parry it, but would reply at once with a point-blank answer. Still, her very views on the subject made it impossible for her to volunteer information unasked to any one. Here was a personal matter of the utmost privacy, a matter which concerned nobody on earth save herself and Alan, a matter on which it was the grossest impertinence for any one else to make any inquiry or hold any opinion. They too chose to be friends, and there, so far as the rest of the world was concerned, the whole thing ended. What else took place between them was wholly a subject for their own consideration. But if ever circumstances should arise which made it necessary for her to avow to the world that she must soon be a mother, then it was for the world to take the first step, if it would act upon its own hateful and cruel initiative. She would never deny, but she would never go out of her way to confess. She stood upon her individuality as a human being. As to other practical matters about which Alan ventured delicately to throw out a passing question or two, her mignia was perfectly frank, with the perfect frankness of one who thinks and does nothing to be ashamed of. She had always been self-supporting, she said, and she would be self-supporting still. To her mind that was an essential step towards the emancipation of women. Their friendship implied for her no change of existence, merely an addition to the fullness of her living. He was the complement of her being. Every woman should naturally wish to live her whole life, to fulfil her whole functions, and that she could do only by becoming a mother, accepting the orbit for which nature designed her. In the end, no doubt, complete independence would be secured for each woman by the civilised state, or in other words by the whole body of men who do the hard work of the world, and who would collectively guarantee every necessary and luxury to every woman of the community equally. In that way alone could perfect liberty of choice and action be secured for women. And she held it just that women should so be provided for, because the mothers of the community fulfil in the state as important and necessary a function as the men themselves do. It would be well, too, that the mothers should be free to perform that function without preoccupation of any sort. So a free world would order things. But in our present barbaric state of industrial slavery, capitalism, monopoly, in other words under the organised rule of selfishness, such a course was impossible. Perhaps, as an intermediate condition, it might happen in time that the women of certain classes would, for the most part, be made independent at maturity each by her own father, which would produce for them in the end pretty much the same general effect of freedom. She saw as a first step the endowment of the daughter. But, meanwhile, there was nothing for it save that as many women as could should aim for themselves at economic liberty, in other words, at self-support. That was an evil in itself, because obviously the prospective mothers of a community should be relieved as far as possible from the stress and strain of earning a livelihood. Should be set free to build up their nervous systems to the highest attainable level against the cause of maternity. But above all things we must be practical, and in the practical world, here and now around us, no other way existed for women to be free save the wasteful way of each earning her own livelihood. Therefore she would continue her schoolwork with her pupils as long as the school would allow her, and when that became impossible would fall back upon literature. One other question Alan ventured gently to raise, the question of children. Fools always put that question and think it a crushing one. Alan was no fool, yet it puzzled him strangely. He did not see for himself how easy is the solution, how absolutely Herminia's plan leaves the position unaltered. But Herminia herself was as modestly frank on the subject as on every other. It was a moral and social point of the deepest importance, and it would be wrong of them to rush into it without due consideration. She had duly considered it. She would give her children, should any come, the unique and glorious birthright of being the only human beings ever born into this world as the deliberate result of a free union, contracted on philosophical and ethical principles. Herminia hinted certain doubts as to their upbringing and education. There, too, Herminia was perfectly frank. They would be half hers, half his. The pleasant burden of their support, the joy of their education would naturally fall upon both parents equally. But why discuss these matters like the squalid rich, who make their marriages a question of settlements and diaries and business arrangements? They, too, were friends and lovers. In love such base doubts could never arise. Not for worlds would she import into their mutual relations any sordid stain of money, any vile tinge of bargaining. They could trust one another. That alone sufficed for them. So Alan gave way bit by bit all along the line, over-born by Herminia's more perfect and logical conception of her own principles. She knew exactly what she felt and wanted, while he knew only in a vague and formless way that his reason agreed with her. A week later he knocked timidly one evening at the door of a modest little workman-looking cottage down a small side-street in the back-wastes of Chelsea. It was a most unpretending street, Bower Lane by name, full of brown brick houses, all as like as peas, and with nothing of any sort to redeem their plain fronts from the common blight of the London Jerry-builder. Only a soft surge curtain and a pot of mignonette on the ledge of the window distinguished the cottage at which Alan Merrick knocked from the others beside it. Externally, that is to say, for within it was as daintier's Morris wall-papers and merino hangings and a delicate feminine taste in form and colour could make it. Keats and Shelley lined the shelves. Rosetti's one maidens gazed unearthly from the over-mancle. The door was opened for him by her mignia in person, for she kept no servant. That was one of her principles. She was dressed from head to foot in a simple white gown, as pure and sweet as the sole it covered. A white rose nestled in her glossy hair. Three sprays of white lily decked her vase on the mantel-piece. Some dim survival of ancestral ideas made her mignia Barton so array herself in the white garb of affiance for her bridal evening. Her cheek was aglow with virginal shrinking as she opened the door and welcomed Alan in. But she held out her hand just as frankly as ever to the man of her free choice as he advanced to greet her. Alan caught her in his arms and kissed her forehead tenderly and thus was her mignia Barton's espousal consummated. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 of The Woman Who Did The next six months were the happiest time of her life for her mignia. All day long she worked hard with her classes, and often in the evenings Alan Merrick dropped in for sweet converse and companionship. Too free from any taint of sin or shame herself ever to suspect that others could misinterpret her actions, her mignia was hardly aware how the gossip of Bower Lane made free in time with the name of the young lady who had taken a cottage in the row, and whose relations with the tall gentleman that called so much in the evenings were beginning to attract the attention of the neighbourhood. The poor slaves of washer-women and working-men's wives all around, with whom contented slavery to a drunken husband, was the only respectable condition. Couldn't understand for the life of them how the pretty young lady should make her name so cheap. And err that pretends to be so irritable and that, and goes about in the parish like a district visitor. Though to be sure it had already struck the minds of Bower Lane that her mignia never went to church nor chapel. And when people cut themselves adrift from church and chapel, why, what sort of morality can you reasonably expect of them? Nevertheless her mignias' manners were so sweet and engaging to rich and poor alike that Bower Lane seriously regretted what it took to be her lapse from grace. Poor, per-blind Bower Lane. A lifetime would have failed it to discern for itself how infinitely higher than its slavish respectability was her mignia's freedom. In which respect indeed Bower Lane was no doubt on a dead level with Belgravia, much of that with Lambeth Palace. But her mignia for her part never discovered she was talked about. To the pure all things are pure, and her mignia was dowered with that perfect purity. And though Bower Lane lay but some few hundred yards off from the Carlisle Place Girl's School, the social gulf between them yet yawned so wide that good old Miss Smith Waters and Cambridge, the headmistress of the school, never caught a single echo of the washer-women's gossip. Her mignia's life through those six months was one unclouded honeymoon. On Sundays she and Allen would go out of town together and stroll across the breezy summit of Leith Hill or among the brown heather and garyless pine-woods that perfume the radiating spurs of hind-head with their aromatic resins. Her love for Allen was profound and absorbing, while as for Allen the more he gazed into the calm depths of that crystal soul, the more deeply did he admire it. Gradually she was raising him to her own level. It is impossible to mix with a lofty nature, and not acquire in time some tincture of its nobler and more generous sentiments. Her mignia was weaning, Allen, by degrees from the world. She was teaching him to see that moral purity and moral earnestness are worth more, after all, than to dwell with purple hangings in all the tents of iniquity. She was making him understand and sympathise with the motives which led her stoutly on to her final martyrdom, which made her submit without a murmur of discontent to her great renunciation. As yet, however, there was no hint or forecast of actual martyrdom. On the contrary, her life flowed in all the halo of a honeymoon. It was a honeymoon, too, undisturbed by the petty jars and discomforts of domestic life. She saw Allen too seldom for either ever to lose the keen sense of fresh delight in the other's presence. When she met him she thrilled to the delicate fingertips. Her mignia had planned it so of set purpose. In her reasoned philosophy of life, she had early decided that it is the wear and tear of too close daily intercourse which turns unawares the lover into the husband. And she had determined that in her own converse with the man she loved that cause of disillusion should never intrude itself. They conserved their romance through all their plighted and united life. Her mignia afterwards no recollections of Allen to look back upon save ideally happy ones. So six months wore away. On the memory of those six months her mignia was to subsist for half a lifetime. At the end of that time Allen began to fear that if she did not soon withdraw from the Carlisle Place School, Miss Smith Waters might begin to ask inconvenient questions. Her mignia ever true to her principles was the stopping on till the bitter end and compelling Miss Smith Waters to dismiss her from her situation. But Allen more worldly wise foresaw that such a course must inevitably result in needless annoyance and humiliation for her mignia. And her mignia was now beginning to be so far influenced by Allen's personality that she yielded the point with reluctance to his masculine judgment. It must be always so. The man must needs retain for many years to come the personal hegemony he has usurped over the woman, and the woman who once accepts him as lover or as husband must give way in the end even in matters of principle to his virile self-assertion. She would be less a woman and he less a man were any other result possible. Deep down in the very roots of the idea of sex we come on that prime antithesis, the male, active and aggressive, the female, sedentary, passive and receptive. And even on the broader question experience shows one it is always so in the world we live in. No man or woman can go through life in consistent obedience to any high principle, not even the willing and deliberate martyrs. We must bow to circumstances. Her mignia had made up her mind beforehand for the crown of martyrdom, the one possible girdon this planet can bestow upon really noble and disinterested action. And she never shrank from any necessary pang incidental to the prophets and martyr's existence. Yet even so, in a society almost wholly composed of mean and petty souls incapable of comprehending or appreciating any exalted moral standpoint, it is practically impossible to live from day to day in accordance with a higher or purer standard. The martyr who should try so to walk without deviation of any sort, turning neither to the right nor to the left in the smallest particular, must accomplish his martyrdom prematurely on the pettiest side issues and would never live at all to assert at the stake the great truth which is the lodestar and goal of his existence. So her mignia gave way. Sadly against her will she gave way. One morning in early March she absented herself from her place in the classroom without even taking leave of her beloved schoolgirls whom she had tried so hard, unobtrusively to train up towards a rational understanding of the universe around them, and sat down to write a final letter of farewell to poor straight-laced kind-hearted Miss Smith Waters. She sat down to it with a sigh, for Miss Smith Waters, though her outlook upon the cosmos was through one narrow chink, was a good soul up to her lights, and had been really fond and proud of her mignia. She had rather shown her off indeed as a social trump card to the hesitating parent. This is our second mistress, Miss Barton. You know her father perhaps such an excellent man, the dean of Dunwich. And now her mignia sat down with a heavy heart, thinking to herself what a stab of pain the avowal she had to make would send throbbing through that gentle old breast, and how absolutely incapable dear Miss Smith Waters could be of ever appreciating the conscientious reasons which had led her ephigenia-like to her self-imposed sacrifice. But for all that she wrote her letter through delicately, sweetly, with feminine tact and feminine reticence. She told Miss Smith Waters frankly enough all it was necessary Miss Smith Waters should know. But she said it with such daintiness that even that conventionalised and hide-bound old maid couldn't help feeling and recognising the purity and nobility of her misguided action. Poor child Miss Smith Waters thought. She was mistaken, of course, sadly and grievously mistaken. But then twas her heart that misled her no doubt. And Miss Smith Waters having dim recollections of a faraway time when she herself too possessed some rudimentary fragment of such a central vascular organ, fairly cried over the poor girl's letter with sympathetic shame and remorse and vexation. Miss Smith Waters could hardly be expected to understand that if Herminia had thought her conduct in the faintest degree wrong, or indeed anything but the highest and best for humanity, she could never conceivably have allowed even that loving heart of hers to hurry her into it. For Herminia's devotion to principle was not less but far greater than Miss Smith Waters' own. Only as it happened the principles themselves were diametrically opposite. Herminia wrote her note with not a few tears for poor Miss Smith Waters' disappointment. That is the worst of living a life morally ahead of your contemporaries. What you do with profound disconviction of its eternal rightness cannot fail to arouse hostile and painful feelings even in the souls of the most right-minded of your friends who still live in bondage to the conventional lies and the conventional injustices. It is the good indeed who are most against you. Still Herminia steeled her heart to tell the simple truth, how for the right sake and humanities she had made up her mind to estue the accursed thing, and to strike one bold blow for the freedom and unfettered individuality of women. She knew in what obliquely her action would involve her, she said. But she knew too that to do right for right's sake was a duty imposed by nature upon every one of us, and that the clearer we could see ahead and the farther in front we could look the more profoundly did that duty shine forth for us. For her own part she had never shrunk from doing what she knew to be right for mankind in the end, though she felt sure it must lead her to personal misery. Yet unless one woman were prepared to lead the way, no freedom was possible. She had found a man with whom she could spend her life in sympathy and united usefulness, and with him she had elected to spend it in the way pointed out to us by nature. Acting on his advice, though somewhat against her own judgment, she meant to leave England for the present, only returning again when she could return with the dear life they had both been instrumental in bringing into the world, and to which henceforth her main attention must be directed. She signed it, your ever-grateful and devoted herminia. Poor Miss Smith Waters laid down that astonishing, that incredible letter in a perfect whirl of amazement and stupifaction. She didn't know what to make of it. It seemed to run counter to all her preconceived ideas of moral action. That a young girl should venture to think for herself at all about right and wrong was passing strange. That she should arrive at original notions upon those abstruse subjects which were not the notions of constituted authority and of the universal slave-drivers and obscurantists generally, notions full of luminousness upon the real relations and duties of our race, was to poor cramped Miss Smith Waters well-nigh inconceivable. That a young girl should prefer freedom to slavery, should deem it more moral to retain her divinely conferred individuality in spite of the world than to yield it up to a man for life in return for the price of her board and lodging. She'd refuse to sell her own body for a comfortable home and the shelter of a name. These things seemed to Miss Smith Waters, with her smaller catechism standards of right and wrong, scarcely short of sheer madness. Yet herminia had so endeared herself to the old lady's soul, that on receipt of her letter Miss Smith Waters went upstairs to her own room with a neurologic headache. And never again in her life referred to her late second mistress in any other terms than as, my poor dear sweet misguided herminia. But when it became known next morning in Boulayne that the queenly-looking schoolmistress who used to go round among our girls with tickets for concerts and lectures and that had disappeared suddenly with the nice young man who used to come accorting her on Sundays and evenings, the amazement and surprise of respectable Boulayne was simply unbounded. Oh, would have thought, the red-faced matrons of the cottages remarked over their court of bitter, the poor thing added in her. But there it's these demure ones as he's always the slyest. For Boulayne could only judge that austere soul by its own vulgar standard, as did also Belgravia. Most low minds indeed imagine absolute hypocrisy must be involved in any striving after goodness and abstract right-doing on the part of any who happen to disbelieve in their own bloodthirsty deities or their own vile woman degrading and prostituting morality. In the topsy-turvy philosophy of Boulayne and of Belgravia what is usual is right, while any conscious striving to be better and nobler than the mass-around one is regarded at once as either insane or criminal. CHAPTER VIII They were bound for Italy, so Alan had decided. Turning over in his mind the pros and cons of the situation, he had wisely determined that Herminia's retirement had better take place somewhere else than in England. The difficulties and inconveniences which block the way in English lodgings would have been well-nigh insufferable. In Italy people would only know that an English senora and her husband had taken apartments for a month or two in some solemn old palazzo. To Herminia, indeed, this expatriation at such a moment was in many ways to the last degree distasteful. For her own part she hated the nearest appearance of concealment, and would rather have flaunted the open expression of her supreme moral faith before the eyes of all London. But Alan pointed out to her the many practical difficulties, amounting almost to impossibilities which beset such a course. And Herminia, though it was hateful to her thus to yield to the immoral prejudices of a false social system, gave way at last to Alan's repeated expression of the necessity for prudent and practical action. She would go with him to Italy, she said, as a proof of her affection and her confidence in his judgment, though she still thought the right thing was to stand by her guns fearlessly and fight it out to the bitter end undismayed in England. On the morning of their departure Alan called to see his father and explain the situation. He felt some explanation was by this time necessary. As yet no one in London knew anything officially as to his relations with Herminia, and for Herminia's sake Alan had hitherto kept them perfectly private. But now further reticence was both useless and undesirable. He determined to make a clean breast of the whole story to his father. It was early for a barrister to be leaving town for the Easter vacation, and though Alan had chambers of his own in Lincoln's Inn where he lived by himself, he was so often in and out of the house in Harley Street that his absence from London would at once have attracted the parental attention. Dr. Merrick was a model of the close-shaven, clear-cut London consultant. His shirt front was as impeccable as his moral character was spotless, in the way that Belgravia and Harley Street still understood spotlessness. He was tall and straight, and unbent by age. The professional poker which he had swallowed in early life seemed to stand him in good stead after sixty years, though his hair had whitened fast, and his brow was furrowed with most deliberative wrinkles. So unapproachable he looked that not even his own sons dared speak frankly before him. His very smile was restrained. He hardly permitted himself for a moment that weak human relaxation. Alan called at Harley Street immediately after breakfast, just a quarter of an hour before the time allotted to his father's first patient. Dr. Merrick received him in the consulting room with an interrogative raising of those straight, thin eyebrows. The mere look on his face disconcerted Alan. With an effort the son began and explained his errand. His father settled himself down into his ample and dignified professional chair, old oak round-backed, and with head half turned and hands folded in front of him seemed to diagnose with rapt attention this singular form of psychological malady. When Alan paused for a second between his halting sentences and floundered about in search of a more delicate way of gliding over the thin ice, his father eyed him closely with those keen grey orbs, and after a moment's hesitation put in a, well, continue, without the faintest sign of any human emotion. Alan, thus driven to it, admitted awkwardly bit by bit that he was leaving London before the end of term, because he had managed to get himself into delicate relations with a lady. Dr. Merrick twirled his thumbs and in a colourless voice inquired without relaxing a muscle of his set face. What sort of lady, please? A lady of the ballet? Oh, no! Alan cried giving a little start of horror. Quite different from that. A real lady. They always are real ladies, for the most part brought down by untoward circumstances, his father responded coldly. As a rule indeed I observed their clergyman's daughters. This one is, Alan answered, growing hot. In point of fact, to prevent you're saying anything you might afterwards regret, I think I'd better mention the lady's name. It's Miss Hermione Barton, the dean of Dunnett's daughter. His father drew a long breath. The corners of the clear-cut mouth dropped down for a second, and the straight, thin eyebrows were momentarily elevated, but he gave no other overt sign of dismay or astonishment. That makes a great difference, of course. He answered, after a long pause. She is a lady, I admit, and she's been to Gertin. She has, the son replied, scarcely knowing how to continue. Dr. Merrick twirled his thumbs once more, without would calm, for a minute or two. This was most inconvenient in a professional family. And I understand you to say—he went on in a pitiless voice. Miss Barton's state of health is such that you would think it advisable to remove her at once, for her confinement to Italy. Exactly so, Alan answered, gulping down his discomfort. The father gazed at him long and steadily. Well, I always knew you were a fool, he said at last, with paternal candour. But I never yet knew you were quite such a fool as this business shows you. You'll have to marry the girl now, in the end. Why, the devil, couldn't you marry her out right at first, instead of seducing her? I did not seduce her, Alan answered, stoutly. No man on earth could ever succeed in seducing that stainless woman. Dr. Merrick stared hard at him, without changing his attitude on his old oak chair. Was the boy going mad, or what the dickens did he mean by it? You have seduced her, he said slowly, and she is not stainless if she has allowed you to do so. It is the innocence which survives experience that I value, not the innocence which dies with it, Alan answered gravely. I don't understand these delicate distinctions, Dr. Merrick interposed with a polite sneer. I gather from what you said just now that the lady is shortly expecting her confinement, and as she isn't married, you tell me, I naturally infer that somebody must have seduced her, either you or some other man. It was Alan's turn now to draw himself up very stiffly. I beg your pardon, he answered, you have no right to speak in such a tone about a lady in Miss Barton's position. Miss Barton has conscientious scruples about the marriage tie, which in theory I share with her. She was unwilling to enter into any relations with me, except in terms of perfect freedom. I see the old man went on with provoking calmness. She preferred, in fact, to be not your wife, but your mistress. Alan rose indignantly. Father, he said, with just wrath, if you insist upon discussing this matter with me in such a spirit, I must refuse to stay here. I came to tell you the difficulty in which I find myself, and to explain to you my position. If you won't let me tell you in my own way, I must leave the house without having laid the facts before you. The father spread his two palms in front of him with demonstrative openness. As you will, he answered, my time is much engaged. I expect a patient at a quarter past ten. You must be brief, please. Alan made one more effort. In a very earnest voice he began to expound to his father Herminia's point of view. Dr. Merrick listened for a second or two in calm impatience. Then he consulted his watch. Excuse me, he said, I have just three minutes. Let us get at once to the practical part, the therapeutics of the case, omitting its etiology. You're going to take the young lady to Italy. When she gets there will she marry you? And do you expect me to help in providing for you both after this insane adventure? Alan's face was red as fire. She will not marry me when she gets to Italy, he answered decisively, and I don't want you to do anything to provide for either of us. The father looked at him with the face he was wont to assume in scanning the appearance of a confirmed monomaniac. She will not marry you, he answered slowly, and you intend to go on living with her in open concubinage. A lady of birth and position, is that your meaning? Father, Alan cried despairingly, Herminia would not consent to live with me on any other terms. To her it would be disgraceful, shameful, a sin, a reproach, a dereliction of principle. She couldn't go back upon her whole past life. She lives for nothing else but the emancipation of women. And you will aid and abet her in her folly? The father asked, looking up sharply at him, you will persist in this evil course? You will face the world and openly defy morality? I will not counsel the woman I most love and admire to purchase her own ease by proving false to her convictions. Alan answered, starkly. Dr. Merrick gazed at the watch on his table once more. Then he rose and rang the bell. Patient here? he asked curtly. Show him in, then, at once. And, Napa, if Mr. Alan Merrick ever calls again, will you tell him I'm out, and your mistress as well, and all the young ladies? He turned coldly to Alan. I must guard your mother and sisters at least, he said in a chilly voice, from the contamination of this woman's opinions. Alan bowed without a word, and left the room. He never again saw the face of his father. End of chapter 8 Chapter 9 Alan Merrick strode from his father's door that day, stung with a burning sense of wrong and injustice. More than ever before in his life, he realised to himself the abject hollowness of that conventional code, which masquerades in our midst as a system of morals. If he had continued to live single, as we hypocritically phrase it, and so helped by one unit to spread the festering social canker of prostitution, on which a basis, like some medieval castle on its foul dungeon vaults, the entire superstructure of our outwardly decent modern society is reared, his father no doubt would have shrugged his shoulders and blinked his cold eyes, and commended the wise young man for abstaining from marriage till his means could permit him to keep a wife of his own class in the way she was accustomed to. The wretched victims of that vile system might die unseen and unpitted in some hideous backslum without touching one cord of remorse or regret in Dr Merrick's nature. He was steeled against their suffering. Or again, if Alan had sold his virility for gold to some rich heiress of his set, like Ethel Waterton, had bartered his freedom to be her wedded paramour in a loveless marriage, his father would not only have gladly acquiesced, but would have congratulated his son on his luck and his prudence. Yet because Alan had chosen rather to form a blameless union of pure affection with a woman who was in every way his moral and mental superior, but in despite of the conventional ban of society, Dr Merrick had cast him off as an open reprobate. And why? Simply because that union was unsanctioned by the exponents of a law they despised, and unblessed by the priests of a creed they rejected. Alan saw at once it is not the intrinsic moral value of an act such people think about, but the light in which it is regarded by a selfish society. Unchastity, it has been well said, is union without love, and Alan would have none of it. He went back to Herminia more than ever convinced of that spotless woman's moral superiority to everyone else he had ever met with. She sat a lonely soul enthroned amid the halo of her own perfect purity. To Alan she seemed like one of those early Italian Madonna's, lost in a glory of light that surrounds and half hides them. He reverenced her far too much to tell her all that had happened. How could he wound those sweet ears with his father's coarse epithets? They took the club train that afternoon to Paris. There they slept the night in a fusty hotel near the Gardinor, and went on in the morning by the daylight expressed to Switzerland. At Lucerne and Milan they broke the journey once more. Herminia had never yet gone further afield from England than Paris, and this first glimpse of a wider world was intensely interesting to her. Who can help being pleased, indeed, with that wonderful St. Goddard, that crystal-green roice shattering itself in white spray into emerald pools by the side of the railway? Varsan Church perched high upon its solitary hilltop. The Biaschina ravine, the cleft rocks of Phaedo. The serpentine twists and turns of the ramping line as it mounts or descends its spiral zig-zags. Dewey alpine pasture, tossed masses of landslip, white narcissus on the banks, snowy peaks in the background. All alike were fresh visions of delight to Herminia, and she drank it all in with the pure childish joy of a poetic nature. It was the Switzerland of her dreams, reinforced and complimented by unsuspected detail. One trouble alone disturbed her peace of mind upon that delightful journey. Alan entered their names at all the hotels where they stopped as Mr. and Mrs. Alan Merrick of London. That deception, as Herminia held it, caused her many qualms of conscience. But Alan, with masculine common sense, was firm upon the point that no other description was practically possible. And Herminia yielded with a sigh to his greater worldly wisdom. She had yet to learn the lesson which sooner or later comes home to all the small minority who care a pin about righteousness, that in a world like our own, it is impossible for the righteous always to act consistently up to their most sacred convictions. At Milan they stopped long enough to snatch a glimpse of the cathedral and to take a hasty walk through the pictured glories of the Brera. A vague suspicion began to cross Herminia's mind as she gazed at the girlish Madonna of the Spazzalizio, that perhaps she wasn't quite as well adapted to love Italy as Switzerland. Nature, she understood, was art yet a closed book to her? If so, she would be sorry, for Alan, in whom the artistic sense was largely developed, loved his Italy dearly, and it would be a real cause of regret to her if she fell short in any way of Alan's expectations. Moreover, at Tabledote that evening a slight episode occurred which roused to the full once more poor Herminia's tender conscience. Talk had somehow turned on Shelley's Italian wanderings, and a benevolent-looking clergyman opposite, with that vacantly well-meaning smile peculiar to a certain type of country rector, was apologising in what he took to be a broad and generous spirit of divine toleration for the great moral teachers supposed lapses from the normal rule of tight living. Much the benevolent-looking gentleman opined with beaming spectacles must be forgiven to men of genius. Their temptations no doubt are far keener than with most of us. An eager imagination, a vivid sense of beauty, quick readiness to be moved by the sight of physical or moral loveliness, these were palliations the old clergyman held of much that seemed wrong and contradictory to our eyes in the lives of so many great men and women. At sound of such immoral and unworthy teaching Herminia's ardent soul rose up in revolt within her. Oh, no! she cried eagerly, leaning across the table as she spoke. I can't allow that, please. It's degrading to Shelley and to all true appreciation of the duties of genius. Not less, but more than most of us, is the genius bound to act up with all his might to the highest moral law, to be the prophet and interpreter of the highest moral excellence. To whom much is given, of him much shall be required. Just because the man or woman of genius stands raised on a pedestal so far above the mass, have we the right to expect that he or she should point us away, should go before us as pioneer, should be more careful of the truth, more disdainful of the wrong down to the smallest particular than the ordinary person. There are poor souls born into this world so petty and narrow and wanting in originality that one can only expect them to tread the beaten track, be it ever so cruel and wicked and mistaken. But from a Shelley or a George Eliot we expect greater things and we have a right to expect them. That's why I can never quite forgive George Eliot, who knew the truth and found freedom for herself and practised it in her life, for upholding in her books the conventional lies, the conventional prejudices. And that's why I can never admire Shelley enough, who, in an age of slavery, refused to abdure or to deny his freedom, but acted under death to the full height of his principles. The benevolent-looking clergyman gazed aghast at Herminia. Then he turned slowly to Alan. Your wife, he said in a mild and terrified voice, is a very advanced lady. Herminia longed to blurt out the whole simple truth. I am not his wife. I am not and could never be wife or slave to any man. This is a very dear friend, and he and I are travelling as friends together. But a warning glance from Alan made her hold her peace with difficulty, and acquiesce as best she might in the virtual deception. Still the incident went to her heart, and made her more anxious than ever to declare her convictions and her practical obedience to them openly before the world. She remembered, oh, so well, one of her father's sermons that had vividly impressed her in the dear old days at Dunnett Cathedral. It was preached upon the text, come ye out and be ye separate. From Milan they went on direct to Florence. Alan had decided to take rooms for the summer at Perugia, and there to see Herminia safely through her maternal troubles. He loved Perugia, he said. It was cool and high perched, and then, too, it was such a capital place for sketching. Besides, he was anxious to complete his studies of the early Umbrian painters. But they must just have one week at Florence together before they went up among the hills. Florence was the place for a beginner to find out what Italian art was aiming at. You got it there in its full logical development, every phase, step by step, in organic unity, while elsewhere you saw but stages and jumps and results interrupted here and there by disturbing Le Cuny. So at Florence they stopped for a week en route, and Herminia first learnt what Florentine art proposed to itself. Ah, that week in Florence! What a dream of delight! It was pure gold to Herminia. How could it well be otherwise? It seemed to her afterwards like the last flicker of joy in a doomed life, before its light went out and left her forever in utter darkness. To be sure, a week is a terribly cramped and hurried time in which to view Florence, the beloved city, whose ineffable glories need at least one whole winter adequately to grasp them. But failing a winter, a week with the gods made Herminia happy. She carried away but a confused Fantasmagoria it is true of the soaring tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, pointing straight with its slender shaft to heaven. Of the swelling dome and huge ribs of the cathedral seen vast from the terrace in front of San Miniatto, of the endless Madonna's and the deathless Saints, niched in golden tabernacles at the Uffizi and the Pizzi, of the tender grace of Fra Angelico at San Marco, of the infinite wealth and astounding variety of Donatello's marble in the spacious courts of the Cool Bargello. But her window at the hotel looked straight as it could look down the humming calzaioli to the pierced and encrusted front of Giotto's Campanile, with the cupola of San Lorenzo in the middle distance and the façade of Fiesole standing out deep blue against the dull red glare of evening in the background. If that were not enough to sate and enchant her Minia, she would indeed have been difficult. And with Alan by her side every joy was doubled. She had never before known what it was to have her lover continuously with her, and his aid in those long corridors where bambinos smiled down at her with childish lips helped her wondrously to understand in so short a time what they sought to convey to her. Alan was steeped in Italy. He knew and entered into the spirit of Tuscan art and now for the first time her Minia found herself face to face with a thoroughly new subject in which Alan could be her teacher from the very beginning as most men are teachers to the woman who depend upon them. This sense of support and restfulness and clinging was fresh and delightful to her. It is a woman's ancestral part to look up to the man. She is happiest in doing it and must long remain so. And her Minia was not sorry to find herself in this so much a woman. She thought it delicious to roam through the long halls of some great gallery with Alan and let him point out to her the pictures he loved best explain their peculiar merits and show the subtle relation in which they stood to the pictures that went before them and the pictures that came after them as well as to the other work of the same master or his contemporaries. It was even no small joy to her to find that he knew so much more about art and its message than she did. That she could look up to his judgment confide in his opinion, see the truth of his criticism profit much by his instruction. So well did she use those seven short days indeed that she came to Florence with Friangelico, Filippolipi, Botticelli, mere names and she went away from it feeling that she had made them real friends and possessions for a lifetime. So the hours whirled fast in those enchanted halls and her mini-soul was enriched by new tastes and new interests. O towers of fretted stone O jasper and porphyry her very state of health made her more susceptible than usual to fresh impressions and drew Alan at the same time every day into closer union with her. For was not the young life now quickening within her half his and half hers and did it not seem to make the father by reflex nearer and dearer to her? Surely the child that was nurtured unborn on those marble colonnades and those placid St. Catherine's must draw in with each pulse of its antinatal nutriment some tincture of beauty, of freedom, of culture. So Herminia thought to herself as she lay awake at night and looked out of the window from the curtains of her bed at the boundless dome and the tall Campanile gleaming white in the moonlight. So we have each of us thought especially the mothers in Israel among us about the unborn babe that hastens along to its birth with such a radiant halo of the possible future ever gilding and glorifying its unseen forehead. End of chapter 9 Chapter 10 of The Woman Who Did This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Ruth Golding The Woman Who Digged by Grant Allen Chapter 10 All happy times must end and the happier the sooner. At one short week's close they hurried on to Perugia. And how full Allen had been of Perugia beforehand he loved every stone of the town every shadow of the hillsides, he told Herminia at Florence and Herminia started on her way accordingly well-prepared to fall quite as madly in love with the Umbrian capital as Allen himself had done. The railway journey indeed seemed extremely pretty. What a march of sweet pictures! They mounted with creaking wheels the slower sent up the picturesque glen where the Arno runs deep to the white towers of Arezzo then Cortona thrown in state on its lonely hilltop and girt by its gigantic Etruscan walls. Next the low bank, the lucid green water the olive-clad slopes of Reedy Trasimene. Last of all the seer hills and city-capped heights of their gold, Perugia. For its name's sake alone Herminia was prepared to admire the antique Umbrian capital and Allen loved it so much and was so determined she ought to love it too that she was ready to be pleased with everything in it until she arrived there and then oh poor heart what a grievous disappointment! It was late April weather when they reached the station at the foot of that high hill where Augusta Perugia sits lording it on her throne over the wedded valleys of the Tiber and the Clitumnus. Tra-Montana was blowing. No rain had fallen for weeks. The slopes of the lower Apennines ever dry and dusty shone still drier and dastier than Allen had yet beheld them. Herminia glanced up at the long white road thick in deep grey powder but led by endless zig-zags along the dreary slope to the long white town on the shadeless hilltop. At first sight alone Perugia was a startling disillusion to Herminia. She didn't yet know how bitterly she was doomed hereafter to hate every dreary dirty street in it but she knew at the first blush Perugia she had imagined and pictured to herself didn't really exist and had never existed. She had figured in her own mind a beautiful breezy town high set on a peaked hill in fresh and mossy country. She had envisaged the mountains to her soul as clad with shady woods and strewn with huge boulders under whose umbrageous shelter loomed waving masses of the pretty pale blue apennine anemones she saw sold in big bunches at the street-corners in Florence. She had imagined in short that Umbria was a wilder Italian wales as fresh, as green, as sweet-scented, as fountain-fed and she knew pretty well when she had derived that strange and utterly false conception. She had fancied Perugia as one of those mountain villages described by Macaulay the sort of hilltop stronghold that hid by beach and pine like an eagle's nest hangs on the crest of purple apennine. Instead of that, what manner of land did she see actually before her? Dry and shadeless hillsides with obtrusive tilts to their topmost summit, plowed fields and hoary olive groves silvering to the wind in interminable terraces. Long suburbs, unlovely in their gaunt bare squalor, stretching like huge arms of some colossal cuttlefish over the spurs and shoulders of that desecrated mountain. No woods, no moss, no coolness, no greenery. All nature toned down to one monotonous greyness. And this dreary desert was indeed the place where her baby must be born, the baby predestined to regenerate humanity. Oh, why did they ever leave that enchanted Florence? Meanwhile Allen had got together the luggage and engaged a ramshackle Perugian cab, for the public vehicles of Perugia are perhaps, as a class, the most precarious and incoherent known to science. However, the luggage was bundled onto the top by our Lady's Grace without dissolution of continuity. The lean-limbed horses were induced by explosive volleys of sound tusk and oaths to make a feeble and spasmodic effort, and bit by bit the sad little cavalcade began slowly to ascend the interminable hill that rises by long loops to the platform of the Prefeitura. That drive was the gloomiest herminia had ever yet taken. Was it the natural fastidiousness of her condition, she wondered, or was it really the dirt and foul smells of the place that made her sicken at first sight of the windswept Perleus? Perhaps a little of both. For in dusty weather Perugia is the most endless town to get out of in Italy, and its capacity for the production of unpleasant odours is unequalled, no doubt, from the Alps to Calabria. As they reached the bare white platform at the entry to the upper town where Pope Paul's grim fortress once frowned to overall the audacious souls of the liberty-loving Umbrians she turned mute eyes to Alan for sympathy. And then for the first time the terrible truth broke over her that Alan wasn't in the least disappointed or disgusted. He knew it all before. He was accustomed to it and liked it. As for Alan he misinterpreted her glance indeed and answered with that sort of proprietary pride we all of us assume towards a place we love and are showing off to a newcomer. Yes, I thought you'd like this view, dearest. Isn't it wonderful, wonderful? That's a sisi over yonder, that strange white town that clings by its eyelashes to the sloping hillside. And those are the snow-clad heights of the Grand Sassel beyond and that's Montefalco to the extreme right where the sunset gleam just catches the hilltop. His words struck dumb horror into Hermania's soul. Poor child, how she shrank at it! It was clear then instead of being shocked and disgusted Alan positively admired this human Sahara. With an effort she gulped down her tears and her sighs and pretended to look with interest in the directions he pointed. She could see nothing in it at all but dry hillsides crowned with still drier towns. Unimagined stretches of sultry suburb devouring wastes of rubbish and foul immemorial kitchen middens. And the very fact that for Alan's sake she couldn't bear to say so, seeing how pleased and proud he was of Perugia as if it had been built from his own design made the bitterness of her disappointment more difficult to endure. She would have given anything at that moment for an ounce of human sympathy. She had to learn in time to do without it. They spent that night at the comfortable hotel perhaps the best in Italy. Next morning they were to go hunting for apartments in the town where Alan knew of a suite that would exactly suit them. After dinner in the twilight filled with his artistic joy at being back in Perugia his beloved Perugia he took Kaminia out for a stroll with a light wrap round her head on the terrace of the Prefeitura. The air blew fresh and cool now with a certain mountain sharpness for as Alan assured her with pride they stood seventeen hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean. The moon had risen. The sunset glow had not yet died off the slopes of the Assisi hillsides. It streamed through the perforated belfry of San Domenico. It steeped in rose-colour the slender and turreted shaft of San Pietro, Perugia's penne, the arrowhead of Umbria. It gilded the gaunt houses that jut out upon the spine of the Borgor hill into the valley of the Tiber. Beyond rose-shadow apennines on whose aerial flanks, towns and villages shone out clear in the mellow moonlight. Far away on their peaks faint specks of twinkling fire marked indistinguishable sights of high hilltop castles. Alan turned to her proudly. Well, what do you think of that? He asked with truly personal interest. Kaminia could only gasp out in a half-reluctant way. It's a beautiful view, Alan. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. But she felt conscious to herself it owed its beauty in the main to the fact that the twilight obscured so much of it. Tomorrow morning the bare hills would stand out once more in all their pristine bareness. The white roads would shine forth as white and dusty as ever. The obtrusive rubbish heaps would press themselves at every turn upon eye and nostril. She hated the place to say the truth. It was a terror to her to think she had to stop so long in it. Most famous towns, in fact, need to be twice seen, the first time briefly to face the inevitable disappointment to our expectations, the second time at leisure to construct and appraise the surviving reality. Imagination so easily beggars performance. Rome, Cairo, the Nile are obvious examples. The grand exceptions are Venice and Florence. In a lesser degree, Bruges, Munich, Pisa. As for Umbria, it is a poor thing. Our own Devon snaps her fingers at it. Moreover, to say the truth, Herminia was too fresh to Italy to appreciate the smaller or second-rate towns at their real value. Even northerners love Florence and Venice at first sight. Those take their hearts by storm, but Perugia, Siena, Orvieto are an acquired taste, like olives and caviar, and it takes time to acquire it. Alan had not made due allowance for this psychological truth of the northern natures. A kelp in essence thoroughly Italianate himself and with a deep love for the picturesque, which often makes men insensible to dirt and discomfort, he expected to Italianise Herminia too rapidly. Herminia, on the other hand, belonged more strictly to the intellectual and somewhat inartistic English type. The picturesque alone did not suffice for her. Cleanliness and fresh air were far dearer to her soul than the quaintest street corners, the oddest old archways. She pined in Perugia for a green English hillside. The time, too, was unfortunate after no rain for weeks, for rainlessness besides doubling the native stock of dust brings out to the full the ancestral Etruscan odours of Perugia. So when next morning Herminia found herself installed in a dingy flat in a morose palazzo in the main street of the city she was glad that Alan insisted on going out alone to make needful purchases of groceries and provisions because it gave her a chance of flinging herself on her bed in a perfect agony of distress and disappointment and having a good cry all alone at the aspect of the home where she was to pass so many eventful weeks of her existence. Dusty, gusty Perugia! Oh, baby, to be born for the freeing of woman! Was it here? Was it here you must draw your first breath in an air polluted by the vices of centuries? End of Chapter 10 Chapter 11 of The Woman Who Did This Librivox recording is in the public domain recording by Ruth Golding The Woman Who Did by Grant Alan Chapter 11 somewhat later in the day they went out for a stroll to her miniature's great relief Alan never even noticed she had been crying manlike he was absorbed in his own delight she would have felt herself a traitor if Alan had discovered it. Which way shall we go? she asked listlessly with a glance to right and left as they passed beneath the somber Tuscan gate of their palazzo and Alan answered smiling why, what does it matter which way you like every way is a picture and so it was Herminia herself was famed to admit in a pure painter's sense that didn't at all attract her lines grouped themselves against the sky in infinite diversity whichever way they turned quaint old walls met their eyes and tumbled down churches and mouldering towers evil palazzi with carved doorways or rich loasures but whichever way they turned dusty roads too confronted them illimitable stretches of gloomy suburb unwholesome airs sickening sights and sounds and perfumes narrow streets swept darkling under pointed archways that framed distant vistas or campanile silhouetted against the solid blue sky of Italy the crystal hardness of that sapphire firmament repelled Herminia they passed beneath the triumphal arch of Augustus with its Etruscan mason work its Roman decorations and round the antique walls a glow with tufted chili flowers to the bare piazza d'armi a cattle fair was going on there and Alan pointed with pleasure to the curious fact that the oxen were all cream-coloured the famous white steers of Clitumnus Herminia knew her Virgil as well as Alan himself and murmured half a loud the sonorous exameter Romanos ad templa deum duxere triunfos but somehow the knowledge that these were indeed the milk-white bullocks of Clitumnus failed amid so much dust to arouse her enthusiasm she would have been better pleased just then with a yellow English primrose they clambered down the terraced ravines sometimes a day or two later to arid banks by a dry torrent's bed where Italian primroses really grew interspersed with tall grape hyacinths and scented violets glossy cleft leaves of winter aconite but even the primroses were not the same thing to Herminia as those she used to gather on the dewy slopes of the Redlands they were so dry and dust grime and the path by the torrent's side was so distasteful and unsavory bare white boughs of twisted fig trees depressed her besides these hills were steep and felt the climbing nothing in city or suburbs attracted her soul Etruscan Volumnii each lolling in white travertine on the sculptured lid of his own sarcophagus urn and all duly ranged in the twilight of their tomb at their spectral banquet stirred her heart but feebly St. Francis Santa Chiara fell flat on her English fancy but as for Alan he reveled all day long in his native element he sketched every morning among the huddled strangled lanes sketched churches and monasteries and portals of Palazzi sketched mountains clear cut in that pelucid air till Herminia wondered how he could sit so long in the broiling sun or keen wind on those bare hillsides or on broken brick parapets in these noisome byways but your born sketcher is oblivious of all on earth save his chosen art and Alan was essentially a painter in fibre diverted by pure circumstance into a chancelly practice the very pictures in the gallery failed to interest Herminia she knew not why Alan couldn't rouse her to enthusiasm over his beloved Buon Filiu those naïve flaxen-haired angels with sweetly-parted lips and baskets of red roses in their delicate hands own sisters though they were to the girlish lippies she had so admired at Florence moved her heart but faintly try as she might to like them she responded to nothing at the end of a week or two however Alan began to complain of constant headache he was looking very well but grew uneasy and restless Herminia advised him to give up sketching for a while those small streets were so close and he promised to yield to her wishes in the matter yet he grew worse next day so that Herminia much alarmed called in an Italian doctor Perugia boasted no English one the Italian felt his pulse and listened to his symptoms the Signore came here from Florence, he asked from Florence Herminia assented with a sudden sinking the doctor protruded his lower lip this is typhoid fever he said after a pause a very bad type it has been assuming such a form this winter at Florence he spoke the plain truth twenty-one days before in his bedroom at the hotel in Florence Alan had drunk a single glass of water from the polluted springs that supply in part the Tuscan metropolis for twenty-one days those victorious microbes had brooded in silence poisoned arteries at the end of that time they swarmed and declared themselves he was ill with an aggravated form of the most deadly disease that still stalks unchecked through unsanitated Europe Herminia's alarm was painful Alan grew rapidly worse in two days he was so ill that she thought it her duty to telegraph at once in London Alan's life in danger serious attack of Florentine typhoid Italian doctor despairs of his life may not last till tomorrow Herminia Barton later on in the day came a telegram in reply it was addressed to Alan I'm on my way out by through train to attend you but as a matter of duty marry the girl at once father chance remains to you it was kindly meant in its way it was a message of love of forgiveness of generosity such as Herminia would hardly have expected from so stern a man as Alan had always represented his father to be to her but at moments of unexpected danger angry feelings between father and son are often forgotten and blood unexpectedly proves weaker than water yet even so Herminia couldn't bear to show the telegram to Alan she feared less in this extremity his mind weakened by disease he might wish to take his father's advice and prove untrue to their common principles in that case woman that she was she hardly knew how she could resist what might be only to probably his dying wishes still she nerved herself for this trial of faith and went through with it bravely Alan though sinking was still conscious at moments in one such interval with an effort to become she showed him his father's telegram tears rose into his eyes I didn't expect him to come he said he was all very good of him then after a moment he added would you wish me in this extremity Hermi to do as he advises Herminia bent over him with fierce tears on her eyelids oh Alan darling she cried you mustn't die you mustn't leave me what could I do without you oh my darling darling my darling but don't think of me now don't think of the dear baby I couldn't bear to disturb you even by showing you the telegram for your sake Alan I'll be calm I'll be calm but oh not for worlds not for worlds even so would I turn my back on the principles we would both risk our lives for Alan smiled a faint smile Hermi he said slowly I love you all the more for it you're as brave as a lion oh how much I have learned from you all that night and next day Herminia watched by his bedside now and again he was conscious but for the most part he lay still in a comatose condition with eyes half closed the whites showing through the lids neither moving nor speaking all the time he grew worse steadily as she sat by his bedside Herminia began to realise the utter loneliness of her position that Alan might die was the one element in the situation she had never even dreamt of no wife she could love her husband with more perfect devotion than Herminia loved Alan she hung upon every breath with unspeakable suspense and unutterable affection but the Italian doctor held out little hope of a rally Herminia sat there fixed to the spot a white marble statue late next evening Eric reached Perugia he drove straight from the station to the dingy flat in the morose palazzo at the door of his son's room Herminia met him clad from head to foot in white as she had sat by the bedside tears blinded her eyes her face was worn her mean terribly haggard and my son the doctor asked with a hushed breath of terror he died half an hour ago Herminia gasped out with an effort but he married you before he died the father cried in a tone of profound emotion he did justice to his child he repaired his evil he did not Herminia answered in a scarcely audible voice he was staunch to the end to his lifelong principles why not the father asked staggering did he see my telegram yes Herminia answered numb with grief yet too proud to prevaricate but I advised him to stand firm and he abode by my decision the father waved her aside with his hands imperiously then I have done with you I am sorry to seem harsh to you at such a moment but it is your own doing you leave me no choice you have no right any longer in my son's apartments end of Chapter 11 Chapter 12 of The Woman Who Did this Librivox recording is in the public domain recording by Ruth Golding The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen Chapter 12 no position in life is more terrible to face than that of the widowed mother left alone in the world with her unborn baby when the child is her first one when besides the natural horror and agony of the situation she has also to confront the unknown dangers of that new and dreaded experience more pitiable but when the widowed mother is one who has never been a wife when in addition to all these pangs of bereavement and fear she has further to face the contempt and hostility of a sneering world as Herminia had to face it then indeed her lot becomes well nigh insupportable it is almost more than human nature can bear up against so Herminia found it she might have died of grief and loneliness then and there had it not been for the sudden and unexpected rousing of her spirit of opposition by Dr. Merrick's words that cruel speech gave her the will and the power to live it saved her from madness she drew herself up at once with an injured woman's pride and facing her dead Allen's father with a quick access of energy you are wrong she said stilling her heart with one hand these rooms are mine my own not dear Allen's I engaged them myself for my own use and in my own name as Herminia Barton you can stay here if you wish I will not imitate your cruelty by refusing you access to them but if you remain here you must treat me at least with the respect that belongs to my great sorrow and with the courtesy due to an English lady her words half-cowed him he subsided at once in silence he stepped over to his dead son's bedside mechanically almost unconsciously Herminia went on with the needful preparations for Allen's funeral her grief was so intense that she bore up as if stunned she did what was expected of her without thinking or feeling it Dr. Merrick stopped on at Perugia till his son was buried he was frigidly polite meanwhile to Herminia deeply as he differed from her the dignity and pride with which she had answered his first insult impressed him with a certain sense of respect for her character and made him feel at least he could not be rude to her with impunity he remained at the hotel and superintendent the arrangements for his son's funeral as soon as that was over and Herminia had seen the coffin lowered into the grave of all her hopes save one she returned to her rooms alone more utterly alone than she had ever imagined any human being could feel in a city full of fellow creatures she must shape her path now for herself without Allen's aid without Allen's advice and her bitterest enemies in life she felt sure would henceforth be those of Allen's household yet lonely as she was she determined from the first moment her new course was left open for her save to remain at Perugia she couldn't go away so soon from the spot where Allen was laid from all that remained to her now of Allen except his unborn baby the baby that was half his half hers the baby predestined to regenerate humanity oh how she longed to fondle it every arrangement had been made in Perugia for the baby's advent she would stand by those arrangements still in her shuttered room partly because she couldn't tear herself away from Allen's grave partly because she had no heart left to make the necessary arrangements elsewhere but partly also because she wished Allen's baby to be born near Allen's side where she could present it after birth at its father's last resting place it was a fanciful wish she knew based upon ideas she had longed since discarded but these ancestral sentiments echo long in our hearts they die hard with us all and most hard with women she would stop on at Perugia and die in giving birth to Allen's baby or else live to be father and mother in one to it so she stopped and waited waited in tremulous fear half longing for death half eager not to leave that sacred baby and orphan it would be Allen's baby and might grow in time to be the world's true saviour when Allen was dead no hope on earth seemed too great to cherish for Allen's child within her and oh that it might be a girl to take up the task she herself had failed in the day after the funeral Dr. Merrick called in for the last time at her lodgings he brought in his hand a legal looking paper which he had found in searching among Allen's effects he came off to his hotel leaving not even a memento of her ill-starred love to Herminia this may interest you he said dryly you will see it once it is in my son's handwriting Herminia glanced over it with a burning face it was a will in her favour leaving absolutely everything of which he died possessed to my beloved friend Herminia had hardly the means to keep herself alive till her baby was born but in those first fierce hours of ineffable bereavement what question of money could interest her in any way she stared at it stupefied it only pleased her to think Allen had not forgotten her the sordid, moneyed class of England will haggle over bequests settlements and dairies on their bridal eve or by the coffins of their dead Herminia had no such ignoble possibilities how could he speak of it in her presence at a moment like this how obtrude such themes on her august sorrow this was drawn up Dr Merrick went on in his austere voice the very day before his son left London but of course you will have observed it was never executed and in point of fact Herminia now listlessly noted that it lacked Allen's signature that makes it I need hardly say of no legal value the father went on with frigid calm I bring it round merely to show you that my son intended to act honourably towards you as things stand and died in testate and his property is such as it is will follow the ordinary law of succession for your sake I am sorry it should be so I could have wished it otherwise however I need not remind you he picked his phrases carefully with icy precision that under circumstances like these neither you nor your child have any claim whatsoever upon my son's estate nor have I any right over it still he paused for a second and that incisive mouth strove to grow gentle while Herminia hot with shame confronted him helplessly I sympathise with your position and do not forget it was Allen who brought you here therefore as an act of courtesy to a lady in whom he was personally interested if a slight gift of fifty pounds would be of immediate service to you in your present situation why I think with the approbation of his brothers and sisters who of course inherit Herminia turned upon him like a wounded creature she thanked the blind caprice which governs the universe that it gave her strength at that moment to bear up under his insult with one angry hand she waved dead Allen's father inexorably to the door go she said simply how dare you how dare you leave my rooms this instant Dr. Merrick still irresolute and anxious in his way to do what he thought was just drew a roll of Italian banknotes from his waistcoat pocket and laid them on the table you may find these useful he said as he retreated awkwardly she turned upon him with the just wrath of a great nature outraged take them up she cried fiercely don't pollute my table then as often happens to all of us in moments of deep emotion a scripture phrase long hallowed by childish familiarity rose spontaneous to her lips take them up she cried again thy money perish with thee Dr. Merrick took them up and slunk noiselessly from the room murmuring as he went some inarticulate words to the effect that he had only desired to serve her as soon as he was gone herminia's nerve gave way she flung herself into a chair and sobbed long and violently it was no time for her, of course, to think about money so oppressed as she was she had just enough left to see her safely through her confinement Alan had given her a few pounds for housekeeping when they first got into the rooms and those she kept, they were hers she had not the slightest impulse to restore them to his family all he left was hers too by natural justice and she knew it he had drawn up his will attestation, clause and all with even the very date inserted in pencil the day before they quitted London together but finding no friends at the club to witness it he had put off executing it and so had left herminia entirely to her own resources in the delirium of his fever the subject never occurred to him but no doubt existed as to the nature of his last wishes and if herminia herself had been placed in a similar position to that of the Merrick family she would have scorned to take so mean an advantage of the mere legal omission by this time, of course the story of her fate had got across to England and was being read and retold by each man or woman after his or her own fashion the papers mentioned it as seen through the optic lens of the society journalist with what strange refraction most of them described in poor herminia's tragedy nothing but material for a smile a sneer or an innuendo the dean himself wrote to her a piteous paternal note which bowed her down more than ever in her abyss of sorrow he wrote as a dean must gray hairs brought down with sorrow to the grave infinite mercy of heaven still room for repentance but owe to keep away from her pure young sisters herminia answered with dignity but with profound emotion she knew her father too well not to sympathize greatly with his natural view of so fatal an episode so she stopped on alone for her dark hour in Perugia she stopped on untended by any save unknown Italians whose tongue she hardly spoke and unteared by a friendly voice at the deepest moment of trouble in a woman's history often for hours together she sat alone in the cathedral gazing up at a certain mild-featured Madonna enshrined above an altar the unwedded widow seemed to gain some comfort from the pitting face of the maiden mother every day while still she could she walked out along the shadeless suburban road to Alan's grave in the parched and crowded cemetery women trudging along with crammed creals on their backs turned round to stare at her when she could no longer walk she sat at her window towards San Luca and gazed at it there lay the only friend she possessed in Perugia perhaps in the universe the dreaded day arrived at last and her strong constitution enabled her Minna to live through it her baby was born a beautiful little girl soft, delicate wonderful with Alan's blue eyes and its mother's complexion those rosy feet saved her Minna as she clasped them in her hands tiny feet tender feet she felt she had now something left to live for her baby the baby with a future the baby that was destined to regenerate humanity so warm so small Alan's soul and her own mysteriously blended still even so she couldn't find it in her heart to give any joyous name to dead Alan's child Dolores she called it at Alan's grave in sorrow had she born it its true name was Dolores End of Chapter 12