Next afternoon, about two o’clock, Alan called with a tremulous heart
at the cottage. Herminia had heard not a little of him meanwhile from
her friend Mrs Dewsbury. “He’s a charming young man, my dear,” the
woman of the world observed with confidence. “I felt quite sure you’d
attract one another. He’s so clever and advanced, and everything that’s
dreadful—just like yourself, Herminia. But then he’s also very well
connected. That’s always something, especially when one’s an oddity.
You wouldn’t go down one bit yourself, dear, if you weren’t a dean’s
daughter. The shadow of a cathedral steeple covers a multitude of sins.
Mr Merrick’s the son of the famous London gout doctor—you _must_ know
his name—all the royal dukes flock to him. He’s a barrister himself,
and in excellent practice. You might do worse, do you know, than to go
in for Alan Merrick.”
Herminia’s lip curled an almost imperceptible curl as she answered
gravely, “I don’t think you quite understand my plans in life, Mrs
Dewsbury. It isn’t my present intention to _go in_ for anybody.”
But Mrs Dewsbury shook her head. She knew the world she lived in. “Ah,
I’ve heard a great many girls talk like that beforehand,” she answered
at once with her society glibness; “but when the right man turned up,
they soon forgot their protestations. It makes a lot of difference,
dear, when a man really asks you!”
Herminia bent her head. “You misunderstand me,” she replied. “I don’t
mean to say I will never fall in love. I expect to do that. I look
forward to it frankly—it is a woman’s place in life. I only mean to
say, I don’t think anything will ever induce me to marry—that is to
say, legally.”
Mrs Dewsbury gave a start of surprise and horror. She really didn’t
know what girls were coming to nowadays—which, considering her first
principles, was certainly natural. But if only she had seen the
conscious flush with which Herminia received her visitor that
afternoon, she would have been confirmed in her belief that Herminia,
after all, in spite of her learning, was much like other girls. In
which conclusion Mrs Dewsbury would not in the end have been fully
justified.
When Alan arrived, Herminia sat at the window by the quaintly clipped
box-tree, a volume of verse held half closed in her hand, though she
was a great deal too honest and transparent to pretend she was reading
it. She expected Alan to call, in accordance with his promise, for she
had seen at Mrs Dewsbury’s how great an impression she produced upon
him; and, having taught herself that it was every true woman’s duty to
avoid the affectations and self-deceptions which the rule of man has
begotten in women, she didn’t try to conceal from herself the fact that
she on her side was by no means without interest in the question how
soon he would pay her his promised visit. As he appeared at the rustic
gate in the privet hedge, Herminia looked out, and changed colour with
pleasure when she saw him push it open.
“Oh, how nice of you to look me up so soon!” she cried, jumping from
her seat (with just a glance at the glass) and strolling out bareheaded
into the cottage garden. “Isn’t this a charming place? Only look at our
hollyhocks! Consider what an oasis after six months of London!”
She seemed even prettier than last night, in her simple white morning
dress, a mere ordinary English gown, without affectation of any sort,
yet touched with some faint reminiscence of a flowing Greek chiton. Its
half-classical drapery exactly suited the severe regularity of her
pensive features and her graceful figure. Alan thought as he looked at
her he had never before seen anybody who appeared at all points so
nearly to approach his ideal of womanhood. She was at once so high in
type, so serene, so tranquil, and yet so purely womanly.
“Yes, it _is_ a lovely place,” he answered, looking around at the
clematis that drooped from the gable-ends. “I’m staying myself with the
Watertons at the Park, but I’d rather have this pretty little
rose-bowered garden than all their balustrades and Italian terraces.
The cottagers have chosen the better part. What gillyflowers and what
columbines! And here you look out so directly on the common. I love the
gorse and the bracken, I love the stagnant pond, I love the very geese
that tug hard at the silverweed, they make it all seem so deliciously
English.”
“Shall we walk to the ridge?” Herminia asked with a sudden burst of
suggestion. “It’s too rare a day to waste a minute of it indoors. I was
waiting till you came. We can talk all the freer for the fresh air on
the hilltop.”
Nothing could have suited Alan Merrick better, and he said so at once.
Herminia disappeared for a moment to get her hat. Alan observed almost
without observing it that she was gone but for a second. She asked none
of that long interval that most women require for the simplest matter
of toilet. She was back again almost instantly, bright and fresh and
smiling, in the most modest of hats, set so artlessly on her head that
it became her better than all art could have made it. Then they started
for a long stroll across the breezy common, yellow in places with
upright spikes of small summer furze, and pink with wild pea-blossom.
Bees buzzed, broom crackled, the chirp of the field cricket rang shrill
from the sand-banks. Herminia’s light foot tripped over the spongy
turf. By the top of the furthest ridge, looking down on North Holmwood
church, they sat side by side for a while on the close short grass,
brocaded with daisies, and gazed across at the cropped sward of Denbies
and the long line of the North Downs stretching away towards Reigate.
Tender greys and greens melted into one another on the larches hard by;
Betchworth chalk-pit gleamed dreamy white in the middle distance. They
had been talking earnestly all the way, like two old friends together;
for they were both of them young, and they felt at once that nameless
bond which often draws one closer to a new acquaintance at first sight
than years of converse.
“How seriously you look at life,” Alan cried at last, in answer to one
of Herminia’s graver thoughts. “I wonder what makes you take it so much
more earnestly than all other women?”
“It came to me all at once when I was about sixteen,” Herminia answered
with quiet composure, like one who remarks upon some objective fact of
external nature. “It came to me in listening to a sermon of my
father’s—which I always look upon as one more instance of the force of
heredity. He was preaching on the text, ‘The Truth shall make you
Free,’ and all that he said about it seemed to me strangely alive, to
be heard from a pulpit. He said we ought to seek the Truth before all
things, and never to rest till we felt sure we had found it. We should
not suffer our souls to be beguiled into believing a falsehood merely
because we wouldn’t take the trouble to find out the Truth for
ourselves by searching. We must dig for it; we must grope after it. And
as he spoke, I made up my mind, in a flash of resolution, to find out
the Truth for myself about everything, and never to be deterred from
seeking it, and embracing it, and ensuing it when found, by any
convention or preconception. Then he went on to say how the Truth would
make us Free, and I felt he was right. It would open our eyes, and
emancipate us from social and moral slaveries. So I made up my mind, at
the same time, that whenever I found the Truth I would not scruple to
follow it to its logical conclusions, but would practise it in my life,
and let it make me Free with perfect freedom. Then, in search of Truth,
I got my father to send me to Girton; and when I had lighted on it
there half by accident, and it had made me Free indeed, I went away
from Girton again, because I saw if I stopped there I could never
achieve and guard my freedom. From that day forth I have aimed at
nothing but to know the Truth, and to act upon it freely; for, as
Tennyson says—
‘To live by law
Acting the law we live by without fear,
And because right is right to follow right,
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.’”
She broke off suddenly, and looking up, let her eye rest for a second
on the dark thread of clambering pines that crest the down just above
Brockham.
“This is dreadfully egotistical,” she cried, with a sharp little start.
“I ought to apologise for talking so much to you about my own
feelings.”
Alan gazed at her and smiled.
“Why apologise,” he asked, “for managing to be interesting? You are
not egotistical at all. What you are telling me is history—the history
of a soul, which is always the one thing on earth worth hearing. I take
it as a compliment that you should hold me worthy to hear it. It is a
proof of confidence. Besides,” he went on, after a second’s pause, “I
am a man; you are a woman. Under those circumstances, what would
otherwise be egotism becomes common and mutual. When two people
sympathise with one another, all they can say about themselves loses
its personal tinge and merges into pure human and abstract interest.”
Herminia brought back her eyes from infinity to his face.
“That’s true,” she said frankly. “The magic link of sex that severs and
unites us makes all the difference. And, indeed, I confess I wouldn’t
so have spoken of my inmost feelings to another woman.”