I do not propose to dwell at any length upon the next ten or twelve
years of Herminia Barton’s life. An episode or two must suffice; and
those few told briefly.
She saw nothing of her family. Relations had long been strained between
them; now they were ruptured. To the rest of the Bartons, she was even
as one dead; the sister and daughter’s name was never pronounced among
them. But once, when little Dolores was about five years old, Herminia
happened to pass a church door in Marylebone, where a red-lettered
placard announced in bold type that the Very Reverend the Dean of
Dunwich would preach there on Sunday. It flashed across her mind that
this was Sunday morning. An overpowering desire to look on her father’s
face once more—she had never seen her mother’s—impelled Herminia to
enter those unwonted portals. The Dean was in the pulpit. He looked
stately and dignified in his long white hair, a noticeable man, tall
and erect to the last, like a storm-beaten pine; in spite of his
threescore years and ten, his clear-cut face shone thoughtful, and
striking, and earnest as ever. He was preaching from the text, “I press
toward the mark for the prize of the high calling.” And he preached, as
he always did, eloquently. His river of speech flowed high between
banks out of sight of the multitude. There was such perfect sincerity,
such moral elevation in all he said, that Herminia felt acutely, as she
had often felt before, the close likeness of fibre which united her to
him, in spite of extreme superficial differences of belief and action.
She felt it so much that when the sermon was over she waited at the
vestry door for her father to emerge. She couldn’t let him go away
without making at least an effort to speak with him.
When the Dean came out, a gentle smile still playing upon his
intellectual face—for he was one of the few parsons who manage in their
old age to look neither sordid nor inane—he saw standing by the vestry
door a woman in a plain black dress, like a widow of the people. She
held by the hand a curly-haired little girl of singularly calm and
innocent expression. The woman’s dark hair waved gracefully on her high
forehead, and caught his attention. Her eyes were subtly sweet, her
mouth full of pathos. She pressed forward to speak to him; the Dean,
all benignity, bent his head to listen.
“Father!” Herminia cried, looking up at him.
The Dean started back. The woman who thus addressed him was barely
twenty-eight, she might well have been forty; grief and hard life had
made her old before her time. Her face was haggard. Beautiful as she
still was, it was the beauty of a broken heart, of a Mater Dolorosa,
not the roundfaced beauty of the fresh young girl who had gone forth
rejoicing some ten years earlier from the Deanery at Dunwich to the
lecture-rooms at Girton. For a moment the Dean stared hard at her. Then
with a burst of recognition he uttered aghast the one word “Herminia!”
“Father,” Herminia answered, in a tremulous voice, “I have fought a
good fight; I have pressed toward the mark for the prize of a high
calling. And when I heard you preach, I felt just this once, let come
what come might, I must step forth to tell you so.”
The Dean gazed at her with melting eyes. Love and pity beamed strong in
them. “Have you come to repent, my child?” he asked, with solemn
insistence.
“Father,” Herminia made answer, lingering lovingly on the word, “I have
nothing to repent of. I have striven hard to do well, and have earned
scant praise for it. But I come to ask today for one grasp of your
hand, one word of your blessing. Father, father, kiss me!”
The old man drew himself up to his full height, with his silvery hair
round his face. Tears started to his eyes; his voice faltered. But he
repressed himself sternly. “No, no, my child,” he answered. “My poor
old heart bleeds for you. But not till you come with full proofs of
penitence in your hands can I ever receive you. I have prayed for you
without ceasing. God grant you may repent. Till then, I command you,
keep far away from me, and from your untainted sisters.”
The child felt her mother’s hand tremble quivering in her own as she
led her from the church; but never a word did Herminia say, lest her
heart should break with it. As soon as she was outside, little Dolly
looked up at her. (It had dwindled from Dolores to Dolly in real life
by this time; years bring these mitigations of our first fierce
outbursts.) “Who was that grand old gentleman?” the child asked, in an
awe-struck voice.
And Herminia, clasping her daughter to her breast, answered with a
stifled sob, “That was your grandpa, Dolly; that was my father, my
father.”
The child put no more questions just then as is the wont of children;
but she treasured up the incident for long in her heart, wondering much
to herself why, if her grandpa was so grand an old gentleman, she and
her mamma should have to live by themselves in such scrubby little
lodgings. Also, why her grandpa, who looked so kind, should refuse so
severely to kiss her Mammy.
It was the beginning of many doubts and questionings to Dolores.
A year later, the Dean died suddenly. People said he might have risen
to be a bishop in his time, if it hadn’t been for that unfortunate
episode about his daughter and young Merrick. Herminia was only once
mentioned in his will; and even then merely to implore the divine
forgiveness for her. She wept over that sadly. She didn’t want the
girls’ money, she was better able to take care of herself than Elsie
and Ermyntrude; but it cut her to the quick that her father should have
quitted the world at last without one word of reconciliation.
However, she went on working placidly at her hack-work, and living for
little Dolly. Her one wish now was to make Dolly press toward the mark
for the prize of the high calling she herself by mere accident had
missed so narrowly. Her own life was done; Alan’s death had made her
task impossible; but if Dolly could fill her place for the sake of
humanity, she would not regret it. Enough for her to have martyred
herself; she asked no mercenary palm and crown of martyrdom.
And she was happy in her life; as far as a certain tranquil sense of
duty done could make her, she was passively happy. Her kind of
journalism was so commonplace and so anonymous that she was spared that
worst insult of seeing her hack-work publicly criticised as though it
afforded some adequate reflection of the mind that produced it, instead
of being merely an index of taste in the minds of those for whose use
it was intended. So she lived for years, a machine for the production
of articles and reviews; and a devoted mother to little developing
Dolly.
On Dolly the hopes of half the world now centred.