Somewhat later in the day, they went out for a stroll through the town
together. To Herminia’s great relief, Alan never even noticed she had
been crying. Man-like, 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 sombre 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 fain 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 tumble-down churches, and mouldering towers,
and mediæval palazzi with carved doorways or rich loggias. 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 of spire 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, aglow with tufted gillyflowers, 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 aloud the sonorous
hexameter, “_Romanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos_.” 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, and
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-grimed, 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 Herminia 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 revelled 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 pellucid 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 those 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
Chancery 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
Buonfigli. 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 Lippis she had so admired at Florence, moved
her heart but faintly. Try as she might to like them, she responded to
nothing Perugian in any way.
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 in his
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 to Dr
Merrick, 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:
“Am on my way out by through train to attend you. But as a matter of
duty, marry the girl at once, and legitimatise your child while the
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 itself
thicker than water. Yet even so Herminia couldn’t bear to show the
telegram to Alan. She feared lest 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 too 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 be calm, she showed
him his father’s telegram. Tears rose into his eyes.
“I didn’t expect him to come,” he said. “This is all very good of him.”
Then, after a moment, he added, “Would you wish me in this extremity,
Hermy, to do as he advises?”
Herminia bent over him with fierce tears on her eyelids.
“O Alan darling,” she cried, “you mustn’t die! You mustn’t leave me!
What could I do without you? oh, my 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.
“Hermy,” 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 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 Dr Merrick 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 wan; her
mien 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,” he exclaimed. “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.”