No position in life is more terrible to face than that of the widowed
mother left alone in the world with her unborn baby. When the child is
her first one—when, besides the natural horror and agony of the
situation, she has also to confront the unknown dangers of that new and
dreaded experience—her plight is still more pitiable. But when the
widowed mother is one who has never been a wife—when in addition to all
these pangs of bereavement and fear, she has further to face the
contempt and hostility of a sneering world, as Herminia had to face
it—then, indeed, her lot becomes well-nigh insupportable; it is almost
more than human nature can bear up against. So Herminia found it. She
might have died of grief and loneliness then and there, had it not been
for the sudden and unexpected rousing of her spirit of opposition by Dr
Merrick’s words. That cruel speech gave her the will and the power to
live. It saved her from madness. She drew herself up at once with an
injured woman’s pride, and, facing her dead Alan’s father with a quick
access of energy,
“You are wrong,” she said, stilling her heart with one hand. “These
rooms are mine—my own, not dear Alan’s. I engaged them myself, for my
own use, and in my own name, as Herminia Barton. You can stay here if
you wish. I will not imitate your cruelty by refusing you access to
them; but if you remain here, you must treat me at least with the
respect that belongs to my great sorrow, and with the courtesy due to
an English lady.”
Her words half cowed him. He subsided at once. In silence he stepped
over to his dead son’s bedside. Mechanically, almost unconsciously,
Herminia went on with the needful preparations for Alan’s funeral. Her
grief was so intense that she bore up as if stunned; she did what was
expected of her without thinking or feeling it. Dr Merrick stopped on
at Perugia till his son was buried. He was frigidly polite meanwhile to
Herminia. Deeply as he differed from her, the dignity and pride with
which she had answered his first insult impressed him with a certain
sense of respect for her character, and made him feel at least he could
not be rude to her with impunity. He remained at the hotel, and
superintended the arrangements for his son’s funeral. As soon as that
was over, and Herminia had seen the coffin lowered into the grave of
all her hopes, save one, she returned to her rooms alone—more utterly
alone than she had ever imagined any human being could feel in a
cityful of fellow-creatures.
She must shape her path now for herself without Alan’s aid, without
Alan’s advice. And her bitterest enemies in life, she felt sure, would
henceforth be those of Alan’s household.
Yet, lonely as she was, she determined from the first moment no course
was left open for her save to remain at Perugia. She couldn’t go away
so soon from the spot where Alan was laid—from all that remained to her
now of Alan. Except his unborn baby—the baby that was half his, half
hers—the baby predestined to regenerate humanity. Oh, how she longed to
fondle it! Every arrangement had been made in Perugia for the baby’s
advent; she would stand by those arrangements still, in her shuttered
room, partly because she couldn’t tear herself away from Alan’s grave;
partly because she had no heart left to make the necessary arrangements
elsewhere; but partly also because she wished Alan’s baby to be born
near Alan’s side, where she could present it after birth at its
father’s last resting-place. It was a fanciful wish, she knew, based
upon ideas she had long since discarded; but these ancestral sentiments
echo long in our hearts; they die hard with us all, and most hard with
women.
She would stop on at Perugia, and die in giving birth to Alan’s baby;
or else live to be father and mother in one to it.
So she stopped and waited; waited in tremulous fear, half longing for
death, half eager not to leave that sacred baby an orphan. It would be
Alan’s baby, and might grow in time to be the world’s true saviour.
For, now that Alan was dead, no hope on earth seemed too great to
cherish for Alan’s child within her.
And oh, that it might be a girl, to take up the task she herself had
failed in!
The day after the funeral, Dr Merrick called in for the last time at
her lodgings. He brought in his hand a legal-looking paper, which he
had found in searching among Alan’s effects, for he had carried them
off to his hotel, leaving not even a memento of her ill-starred love to
Herminia.
“This may interest you,” he said dryly. “You will see at once it is in
my son’s handwriting.”
Herminia glanced over it with a burning face. It was a will in her
favour, leaving absolutely everything of which he died possessed “to my
beloved friend, Herminia Barton.”
Herminia had hardly the means to keep herself alive till her baby was
born; but in those first fierce hours of ineffable bereavement what
question of money could interest her in any way? She stared at it,
stupefied. It only pleased her to think Alan had not forgotten her.
The sordid moneyed class of England will haggle over bequests and
settlements and dowries on their bridal eve, or by the coffins of their
dead. Herminia had no such ignoble possibilities. How could he speak of
it in her presence at a moment like this? How obtrude such themes on
her august sorrow?
“This was drawn up,” Dr Merrick went on in his austere voice, “the very
day before my late son left London. But, of course, you will have
observed it was never executed.”
And in point of fact Herminia now listlessly noted that it lacked
Alan’s signature.
“That makes it, I need hardly say, of no legal value,” the father went
on, with frigid calm. “I bring it round merely to show you that my son
intended to act honourably towards you. As things stand, of course, he
has died intestate, and his property, such as it is, will follow the
ordinary law of succession. For your sake, I am sorry it should be so;
I could have wished it otherwise. However, I need not remind you”—he
picked his phrases carefully with icy precision—“that under
circumstances like these neither you nor your child have any claim
whatsoever upon my son’s estate. Nor have I any right over it.
Still”—he paused for a second, and that incisive mouth strove to grow
gentle, while Herminia hot with shame, confronted him helplessly—“I
sympathise with your position, and do not forget it was Alan who
brought you here. Therefore, as an act of courtesy to a lady in whom he
was personally interested . . . if a slight gift of fifty pounds would
be of immediate service to you in your present situation, why, I think,
with the approbation of his brothers and sisters, who of course
inherit——”
Herminia turned upon him like a wounded creature. She thanked the blind
caprice which governs the universe that it gave her strength at that
moment to bear up under his insult. With one angry hand she waved dead
Alan’s father inexorably to the door. “Go,” she said simply. “How dare
you? how dare you? Leave my rooms this instant.”
Dr Merrick still irresolute, and anxious in his way to do what he
thought was just, drew a roll of Italian bank notes from his waistcoat
pocket, and laid them on the table. “You may find these useful,” he
said, as he retreated awkwardly.
Herminia turned upon him with the just wrath of a great nature
outraged. “Take them up!” she cried fiercely. “Don’t pollute my table!”
Then, as often happens to all of us in moments of deep emotion, a
Scripture phrase, long hallowed by childish familiarity, rose
spontaneous to her lips. “Take them up!” she cried again. “Thy money
perish with thee!”
Dr Merrick took them up, and slank noiselessly from the room, murmuring
as he went some inarticulate words to the effect that he had only
desired to serve her. As soon as he was gone, Herminia’s nerve gave
way. She flung herself into a chair, and sobbed long and violently.
It was no time for her, of course, to think about money. Sore pressed
as she was, she had just enough left to see her safely through her
confinement. Alan had given her a few pounds for housekeeping when they
first got into the rooms, and those she kept; they were hers; she had
not the slightest impulse to restore them to his family. All he left
was hers too, by natural justice; and she knew it. He had drawn up his
will, attestation clause and all, with even the very date inserted in
pencil, the day before they quitted London together; but finding no
friends at the club to witness it, he had put off executing it; and so
had left Herminia entirely to her own resources. In the delirium of his
fever, the subject never occurred to him. But no doubt existed as to
the nature of his last wishes; and if Herminia herself had been placed
in a similar position to that of the Merrick family, she would have
scorned to take so mean an advantage of the mere legal omission.
By this time, of course, the story of her fate had got across to
England, and was being read and retold by each man or woman after his
or her own fashion. The papers mentioned it, as seen through the optic
lens of the society journalist, with what strange refraction. Most of
them descried in poor Herminia’s tragedy nothing but material for a
smile, a sneer, or an innuendo. The Dean himself wrote to her, a
piteous, paternal note, which bowed her down more than ever in her
abyss of sorrow. He wrote as a dean must—grey hairs brought down with
sorrow to the grave; infinite mercy of Heaven; still room for
repentance; but oh, to keep away from her pure young sisters! Herminia
answered with dignity, but with profound emotion. She knew her father
too well not to sympathise greatly with his natural view of so fatal an
episode.
So she stopped on alone for her dark hour in Perugia. She stopped on,
untended by any save unknown Italians whose tongue she hardly spoke,
and uncheered by a friendly voice at the deepest moment of trouble in a
woman’s history. Often for hours together she sat alone in the
cathedral, gazing up at a certain mild-featured Madonna, enshrined
above an altar. The unwedded widow seemed to gain some comfort from the
pitying face of the maiden mother. Every day, while still she could,
she walked out along the shadeless suburban road to Alan’s grave in the
parched and crowded cemetery. Women trudging along with crammed creels
on their backs turned round to stare at her. When she could no longer
walk, she sat at her window towards San Luca and gazed at it. There lay
the only friend she possessed in Perugia, perhaps in the universe.
The dreaded day arrived at last, and her strong constitution enabled
Herminia to live through it. Her baby was born, a beautiful little
girl, soft, delicate, wonderful, with Alan’s blue eyes, and its
mother’s complexion. Those rosy feet saved Herminia. As she clasped
them in her hands—tiny feet, tender feet—she felt she had now something
left to live for—her baby, Alan’s baby, the baby with a future, the
baby that was destined to regenerate humanity.
So warm! So small! Alan’s soul and her own, mysteriously blended.
Still, even so, she couldn’t find it in her heart to give any joyous
name to dead Alan’s child. Dolores she called it, at Alan’s grave. In
sorrow had she borne it; its true name was Dolores.