by Grant Allen
But the coachman observed to the footman, as they drove on together to the next noble patient’s, “You may take your oath on it, Mr. Wells, that little ‘un there was Mr. Alan’s love-child!”
Dolly had never held so much money in her hand before; she ran home, clutching it tight, and burst in upon Herminia with the startling news that Sir Anthony Merrick, a very grand gentleman in a very fine carriage, had given a gold piece to her.
Gold pieces were rare in the calm little attic, but Herminia caught her child up with a cry of terror; and that very same evening, she changed the tainted sovereign with Dolly for another one, and sent Sir Anthony’s back in an envelope without a word to Harley Street. The child who was born to free half the human race from aeons of slavery must be kept from all contagion of man’s gold and man’s bribery. Yet Dolly never forgot the grand gentleman’s name, though she hadn’t the least idea why he gave that yellow coin to her.
Out of this small episode, however, grew Herminia’s great temptation.
For Sir Anthony, being a man tenacious of his purpose, went home that day full of relenting thoughts about that girl Dolores. Her golden hair had sunk deep into his heart. She was Alan’s own child, after all; she had Alan’s blue eyes; and in a world where your daughters go off and marry men you don’t like, while your sons turn out badly, and don’t marry at all to vex you, it’s something to have some fresh young life of your blood to break in upon your chilly old age and cheer you. So the great doctor called a few days later at Herminia’s lodgings, and having first ascertained that Herminia herself was out, had five minutes’ conversation alone with her landlady.
There were times, no doubt, when Mrs. Barton was ill? The landlady with the caution of her class, admitted that might be so. And times no doubt when Mrs. Barton was for the moment in arrears with her rent? The landlady, good loyal soul, demurred to that suggestion; she knit her brows and hesitated. Sir Anthony hastened to set her mind at rest. His intentions were most friendly. He wished to keep a watch, — a quiet, well-meaning, unsuspected watch, — over Mrs. Barton’s necessities. He desired, in point of fact, if need were, to relieve them. Mrs. Barton was distantly connected with relations of his own; and his notion was that without seeming to help her in obtrusive ways, he would like to make sure Mrs. Barton got into no serious difficulties. Would the landlady be so good — a half sovereign glided into that subservient palm — as to let Sir Anthony know if she ever had reason to suspect a very serious strain was being put on Mrs. Barton’s resources?
The landlady, dropping the modern apology for a courtesy, promised with effusion under pressure of hard cash, to accede to Sir Anthony’s benevolent wishes. The more so as she’d do anything to serve dear Mrs. Barton, who was always in everything a perfect lady, most independent, in fact; one of the kind as wouldn’t be beholden to anybody for a farthing.
Some months passed away before the landlady had cause to report to Sir Anthony. But during the worst depths of the next London winter, when gray fog gathered thick in the purlieus of Marylebone, and shivering gusts groaned at the street corners, poor little Dolly caught whooping-cough badly. On top of the whooping-cough came an attack of bronchitis; and on top of the bronchitis a serious throat trouble. Herminia sat up night after night, nursing her child, and neglecting the work on which both depended for subsistence. Week by week things grew worse and worse; and Sir Anthony, kept duly informed by the landlady, waited and watched, and bided his time in silence. At last the case became desperate. Herminia had no money left to pay her bill or buy food; and one string to her bow after another broke down in journalism. Her place as the weekly lady’s-letter writer to an illustrated paper passed on to a substitute; blank poverty stared her in the face, inevitable. When it came to pawning the type-writer, as the landlady reported, Sir Anthony smiled a grim smile to himself. The moment for action had now arrived. He would put on pressure to get away poor Alan’s illegitimate child from that dreadful woman.
Next day he called. Dolly was dangerously ill, — so ill that Herminia couldn’t find it in her heart to dismiss the great doctor from her door without letting him see her. And Sir Anthony saw her. The child recognized him at once and rallied, and smiled at him. She stretched her little arms. She must surely get well if a gentleman who drove in so fine a carriage, and scattered sovereigns like ha’pennies, came in to prescribe for her. Sir Anthony was flattered at her friendly reception. Those thin small arms touched the grandfather’s heart. “She will recover,” he said; “but she needs good treatment, delicacies, refinements.” Then he slipped out of the room, and spoke seriously to Herminia. “Let her come to me,” he urged. “I’ll adopt her, and give her her father’s name. It will be better for herself; better for her future. She shall be treated as my granddaughter, well-taught, well-kept; and you may see her every six months for a fortnight’s visit. If you consent, I will allow you a hundred a year for yourself. Let bygones be bygones. For the child’s sake, say YES! She needs so much that you can never give her!”
Poor Herminia was sore tried. As for the hundred a year, she couldn’t dream of accepting it; but like a flash it went through her brain how many advantages Dolly could enjoy in that wealthy household that the hard-working journalist could not possibly afford her. She thought of the unpaid bills, the empty cupboard, the wolf at the door, the blank outlook for the future. For a second, she half hesitated. “Come, come!” Sir Anthony said; “for the child’s own sake; you won’t be so selfish as to stand in her way, will you?”
Those words roused Herminia to a true sense of her duty. “Sir Anthony Merrick,” she said holding her breath, “that child is my child, and my dear dead Alan’s. I owe it to Alan, — I owe it to her, — to bring her up in the way that Alan would approve of. I brought her into the world; and my duty is to do what I can to discharge the responsibilities I then undertook to her. I must train her up to be a useful citizen. Not for thousands would I resign the delight and honor of teaching my child to those who would teach her what Alan and I believed to be pernicious; who would teach her to despise her mother’s life, and to reject the holy memory of her father. As I said to you before, that day at Perugia, so I say to you now, ‘Thy money perish with thee.’ You need never again come here to bribe me.”
“Is that final?” Sir Anthony asked. And Herminia answered with a bow, “Yes, final; quite final.”
Sir Anthony bent his head and left. Herminia stood face to face with abject poverty. Spurred by want, by indignation, by terror, by a sense of the absolute necessity for action, she carried her writing materials then and there into Dolly’s sick-room, and sitting by her child’s cot, she began to write, she hardly knew what, as the words themselves came to her. In a fever of excitement she wrote and wrote and wrote. She wrote as one writes in the silence of midnight. It was late before she finished. When her manuscript was complete, she slipped out and posted it to a weekly paper. It appeared that same Saturday, and was the beginning of Herminia’s most valuable connection.
But even after she had posted it the distracted mother could not pause or rest. Dolly tossed and turned in her sleep, and Herminia sat watching her. She pined for sympathy. Vague ancestral yearnings, gathering head within her, made her long to pray, — if only there had been anybody or anything to pray to. She clasped her bloodless hands in an agony of solitude. Oh, for a friend to comfort! At last her overwrought feelings found vent in verse. She seized a pencil from her desk, and sitting by Dolly’s side, wrote down her heart-felt prayer, as it came to her that moment, —
A crowned Caprice is god of the world:
On his stony breast are his white wings furled.
No ear to hearken, no eye to see,
No heart to feel for a man hath he.
But his pitiless hands are swift to smite,
And his mute lips utter one word of might
In the clash of gentler souls and rougher —
‘Wrong must thou do, or wrong must suffer.’
Then grant, O dumb, blind god, at
least that we
Rather the sufferers than the doers be.
XVI.
A change came at last, when Dolly was ten years old. Among the men of whom Herminia saw most in these later days, were the little group of advanced London socialists who call themselves the Fabians. And among her Fabian friends one of the most active, the most eager, the most individual, was Harvey Kynaston.
He was a younger man by many years than poor Alan had been; about Herminia’s own age; a brilliant economist with a future before him. He aimed at the Cabinet. When first he met Herminia he was charmed at one glance by her chastened beauty, her breadth and depth of soul, her transparent sincerity of purpose and action. Those wistful eyes captured him. Before many days passed he had fallen in love with her. But he knew her history; and, taking it for granted she must still be immersed in regret for Alan’s loss, he hardly even reckoned the chances of her caring for him.
’Tis a common case. Have you ever noticed that if you meet a woman, famous for her connection with some absorbing grief, some historic tragedy, you are half appalled at first sight to find that at times she can laugh, and make merry, and look gay with the rest of us. Her callous glee shocks you. You mentally expect her to be forever engaged in the tearful contemplation of her own tragic fate; wrapt up in those she has lost, like the mourners in a Pieta. Whenever you have thought of her, you have connected her in your mind with that one fact in her history, which perhaps may have happened a great many years ago. But to you, it is as yesterday. You forget that since then many things have occurred to her. She has lived her life; she has learned to smile; human nature itself cannot feed for years on the continuous contemplation of its own deepest sorrows. It even jars you to find that the widow of a patriotic martyr, a murdered missionary, has her moments of enjoyment, and must wither away without them.
So, just at first, Harvey Kynaston was afraid to let Herminia see how sincerely he admired her. He thought of her rather as one whose life is spent, who can bring to the banquet but the cold dead ashes of a past existence. Gradually, however, as he saw more and more of her, it began to strike him that Herminia was still in all essentials a woman. His own throbbing heart told him so as he sat and talked with her. He thrilled at her approach. Bit by bit the idea rose up in his mind that this lonely soul might still be won. He set to work in earnest to woo and win her.
As for Herminia, many men had paid her attentions already in her unwedded widowhood. Some of them, after the fashion of men, having heard garbled versions of her tragic story, and seeking to gain some base advantage for themselves from their knowledge of her past, strove to assail her crudely. Them, with unerring womanly instinct, she early discerned, and with unerring feminine tact, undeceived and humbled. Others, genuinely attracted by her beauty and her patience, paid real court to her heart; but all these fell far short of her ideal standard. With Harvey Kynaston it was different. She admired him as a thinker; she liked him as a man; and she felt from the first moment that no friend, since Alan died, had stirred her pulse so deeply as he did.
For some months they met often at the Fabian meetings and elsewhere; till at last it became a habit with them to spend their Sunday mornings on some breezy wold in the country together. Herminia was still as free as ever from any shrinking terror as to what “people might say;” as of old, she lived her life for herself and her conscience, not for the opinion of a blind and superstitious majority. On one such August morning, they had taken the train from London to Haslemere, with Dolly of course by their side, and then had strolled up Hind Head by the beautiful footpath which mounts at first through a chestnut copse, and then between heather-clad hills to the summit. At the loneliest turn of the track, where two purple glens divide, Harvey Kynaston seated himself on the soft bed of ling; Herminia sank by his side; and Dolly, after awhile, not understanding their conversation, wandered off by herself a little way afield in search of harebells and spotted orchises. Dolly found her mother’s friends were apt to bore her; she preferred the society of the landlady’s daughters.
It was a delicious day. Hard by, a slow-worm sunned himself on the basking sand. Blue dragon-flies flashed on gauze wings in the hollows. Harvey Kynaston looked on Herminia’s face and saw that she was fair. With an effort he made up his mind to speak at last. In plain and simple words he asked her reverently the same question that Alan had asked her so long ago on the Holmwood.
Herminia’s throat flushed a rosy red, and an unwonted sense of pleasure stole over that hard-worked frame as she listened to his words; for indeed she was fond of him. But she answered him at once without a moment’s hesitation. “Harvey, I’m glad you ask me, for I like and admire you. But I feel sure beforehand my answer must be NO. For I think what you mean is to ask, will I marry you?”
The man gazed at her hard. He spoke low and deferentially. “Yes, Herminia,” he replied. “I do mean, will you marry me? I know, of course, how you feel about this matter; I know what you have sacrificed, how deeply you have suffered, for the sake of your principles. And that’s just why I plead with you now to ignore them. You have given proof long ago of your devotion to the right. You may surely fall back this second time upon the easier way of ordinary humanity. In theory, Herminia, I accept your point of view; I approve the equal liberty of men and women, politically, socially, personally, ethically. But in practice, I don’t want to bring unnecessary trouble on the head of a woman I love; and to live together otherwise than as the law directs does bring unnecessary trouble, as you know too profoundly. That is the only reason why I ask you to marry me. And Herminia, Herminia,” he leant forward appealingly, “for the love’s sake I bear you, I hope you will consent to it.”
His voice was low and tender. Herminia, sick at heart with that long fierce struggle against overwhelming odds, could almost have said YES to him. Her own nature prompted her; she was very, very fond of him. But she paused for a second. Then she answered him gravely.
“Harvey,” she said, looking deep into his honest brown eyes, “as we grow middle-aged, and find how impossible it must ever be to achieve any good in a world like this, how sad a fate it is to be born a civilized being in a barbaric community, I’m afraid moral impulse half dies down within us. The passionate aim grows cold; the ardent glow fades and flickers into apathy. I’m ashamed to tell you the truth, it seems such weakness; yet as you ask me this, I think I WILL tell you. Once upon a time, if you had made such a proposal to me, if you had urged me to be false to my dearest principles, to sin against the light, to deny the truth, I would have flashed forth a NO upon you without one moment’s hesitation. And now, in my disillusioned middle age what do I feel? Do you know, I almost feel tempted to give way to this Martinmas summer of love, to stultify my past by unsaying and undoing everything. For I love you, Harvey. If I were to give way now, as George Eliot gave way, as almost every woman who once tried to live a free life for her sisters’ sake, has given way in the end, I should counteract any little good my example has ever done or may ever do in the world; and Harvey, strange as it sounds, I feel more than half inclined to do it. But I WILL not, I WILL not; and I’ll tell you why. It’s not so much principle that prevents me now. I admit that freely. The torpor of middle age is creeping over my conscience. It’s simple regard for personal consistency, and for Dolly’s position. How can I go back upon the faith for which I have martyred myself? How can I say to Dolly, ‘I wouldn’t marry your father in my youth, for honor’s sake; but I have consented in middle life to sell my sisters’ cause for a man I love, and for the consideration of society; to rehabilitate myself too late with a world I despise by becoming one man’s slave, as I swore I never would be.’ No, no, dear Harvey; I can’t do that. Some sense of personal continuity restrains me still. It is the Nemesis of our youth; we can’t go back in our later life on the holier and purer ideals of our girlhood.”
“Then you say no definitely?” Harvey Kynaston asked.
Herminia’s voice quivered. “I say no definitely,” she answered; “unle
ss you can consent to live with me on the terms on which I lived with Dolly’s father.”
The man hesitated a moment. Then he began to plead hard for reconsideration. But Herminia’s mind was made up. She couldn’t belie her past; she couldn’t be false to the principles for whose sake she had staked and lost everything. “No, no,” she said firmly, over and over again. “You must take me my own way, or you must go without me.”
And Harvey Kynaston couldn’t consent to take her her own way. His faith was too weak, his ambitions were too earthly. “Herminia,” he said, before they parted that afternoon, “we may still be friends; still dear friends as ever? This episode need make no difference to a very close companionship?”
“It need make no difference,” Herminia answered, with a light touch of her hand. “Harvey, I have far too few friends in the world willingly to give up one of them. Come again and go down with Dolly and me to Hind Head as usual next Sunday.”
“Thank you,” the man answered. “Herminia, I wish it could have been otherwise. But since I must never have you, I can promise you one thing; I will never marry any other woman.”
Herminia started at the words. “Oh, no,” she cried quickly. “How can you speak like that? How can you say anything so wrong, so untrue, so foolish? To be celibate is a very great misfortune even for a woman; for a man it is impossible, it is cruel, it is wicked. I endure it myself, for my child’s sake, and because I find it hard to discover the help meet for me; or because, when discovered, he refuses to accept me in the only way in which I can bestow myself. But for a man to pretend to live celibate is to cloak hateful wrong under a guise of respectability. I should be unhappy if I thought any man was doing such a vicious thing out of desire to please me. Take some other woman on free terms if you can; but if you cannot, it is better you should marry than be a party to still deeper and more loathsome slavery.”
