by Grant Allen
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 confinement 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 signora 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 merest 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, gray 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 colorless voice enquired, 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 observe, they’re clergyman’s daughters.”
“This one is,” Alan answered, growing hot. “In point of fact, to prevent your saying anything you might afterwards regret, I think I’d better mention the lady’s name. It’s Miss Herminia Barton, the Dean of Dunwich’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 Girton.”
“She has,” the son replied, scarcely knowing how to continue.
Dr. Merrick twirled his thumbs once more, with outward 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 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 candor; “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 outright 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 aetiology: 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 stoutly.
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, Napper, 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.
IX.
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 realized 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 as basis, like some mediaeval 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 unpitied in some hideous back slum, without touching one chord 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 every one 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 Madonnas, 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 Gare du Nord, and went on in the morning by the daylight express 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. Gothard — the crystal green Reuss shattering itself in white spray into emerald pools by the side of the railway; Wasen church perched high upon its solitary hilltop; the Biaschina ravine, the cleft rocks of Faido, the serpentine twists and turns of the ramping line as it mounts or descends its spiral zigzags? Dewy Alpine pasture, tossed masses of land-slip, 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 complemented 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, cost 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 sign 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 Sposalizio, 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 table d’hote 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 apologizing in what he took to be a broad and generous spirit of divine, toleration for the great moral teacher’s 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 plea. 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 the way, 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 abjure or to deny his freedom, but acted unto 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 Dunwich 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 have just 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 lacunae. 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! ’Twas 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 phantasmagoria, 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 Miniato; of the endless Madonnas and the deathless saints niched in golden tabernacles at the Uffizi and the Pitti; 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 facade 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 Herminia, she would indeed have been difficult. And with Alan by her side, every joy was doubled.
