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 as basis, like some mediæval 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’hôte_ 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 teacher’s supposed
lapses from the normal rule of right 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 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
Herminia, 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 Herminia 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 women 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 Herminia 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 Fra Angelico, Filippo
Lippi, 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 Herminia’s 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
Saint Catherines must draw in with each pulse of its antenatal
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.