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X

All happy times must end, and the happier the sooner. At one short week's close they hurried on to Perugia.

And how full Alan had been of Perugia beforehand! He loved every stone of the town, every shadow of the hillsides, he told Herminia at Florence; and Herminia started on her way accordingly well prepared to fall quite as madly in love with the Umbrian capital as Alan himself had done.

The railway journey, indeed, seemed extremely pretty. What a march of sweet pictures! They mounted with creaking wheels the slow ascent up the picturesque glen where the Arno runs deep, to the white towers of Arezzo; then Cortona throned in state on its lonely hill-top, and girt by its gigantic Etruscan walls; next the low bank, the lucid green water, the olive-clad slopes of reedy Thrasymene; last of all, the sere hills and city-capped heights of their goal, Perugia.

For its name's sake alone, Herminia was prepared to admire the antique Umbrian capital. And Alan loved it so much, and was so determined she ought to love it too, that she was ready to be pleased with everything in it. Until she arrived there—and then, oh, poor heart, what a grievous disappointment! It was late April weather when they reached the station at the foot of that high hill where Augusta Perusia sits lording it on her throne over the wedded valleys of the Tiber and the Clitumnus. Tramontana was blowing. No rain had fallen for weeks; the slopes of the lower Apennines, ever dry and dusty, shone still drier and dustier than Alan had yet beheld them. Herminia glanced up at the long white road, thick in deep gray powder, that led by endless zigzags along the dreary slope to the long white town on the shadeless hill-top. At first sight alone, Perugia was a startling disillusion to Herminia. She didn't yet know how bitterly she was doomed hereafter to hate every dreary dirty street in it. But she knew at the first blush that the Perugia she had imagined and pictured to herself didn't really exist and had never existed.

She had figured in her own mind a beautiful breezy town, high set on a peaked hill, in fresh and mossy country. She had envisaged the mountains to her soul as clad with shady woods, and strewn with huge boulders under whose umbrageous shelter bloomed waving masses of the pretty pale blue Apennine anemones she saw sold in big bunches at the street corners in Florence. She had imagined, in short, that Umbria was a wilder Italian Wales, as fresh, as green, as sweet-scented, as fountain-fed. And she knew pretty well whence she had derived that strange and utterly false conception. She had fancied Perugia as one of those mountain villages described by Macaulay, the sort of hilltop stronghold

 
"That, hid by beech and pine,
Like an eagle's nest hangs on the crest
Of purple Apennine."
 

Instead of that, what manner of land did she see actually before her? Dry and shadeless hill-sides, tilled with obtrusive tilth to their topmost summit; ploughed fields and hoary olive-groves silvering to the wind, in interminable terraces; long suburbs, unlovely in their gaunt, bare squalor, stretching like huge arms of some colossal cuttlefish over the spurs and shoulders of that desecrated mountain. No woods, no moss, no coolness, no greenery; all nature toned down to one monotonous grayness. And this dreary desert was indeed the place where her baby must be born, the baby predestined to regenerate humanity!

Oh, why did they ever leave that enchanted Florence!

Meanwhile Alan had got together the luggage, and engaged a ramshackle Perugian cab; for the public vehicles of Perugia are perhaps, as a class, the most precarious and incoherent known to science. However, the luggage was bundled on to the top by Our Lady's grace, without dissolution of continuity; the lean-limbed horses were induced by explosive volleys of sound Tuscan oaths to make a feeble and spasmodic effort; and bit by bit the sad little cavalcade began slowly to ascend the interminable hill that rises by long loops to the platform of the Prefettura.

That drive was the gloomiest Herminia had ever yet taken. Was it the natural fastidiousness of her condition, she wondered, or was it really the dirt and foul smells of the place that made her sicken at first sight of the wind-swept purlieus? Perhaps a little of both; for in dusty weather Perugia is the most endless town to get out of in Italy; and its capacity for the production of unpleasant odors is unequalled no doubt from the Alps to Calabria. As they reached the bare white platform at the entry to the upper town, where Pope Paul's grim fortress once frowned to overawe the audacious souls of the liberty-loving Umbrians, she turned mute eyes to Alan for sympathy. And then for the first time the terrible truth broke over her that Alan wasn't in the least disappointed or disgusted; he knew it all before; he was accustomed to it and liked it! As for Alan, he misinterpreted her glance, indeed, and answered with that sort of proprietary pride we all of us assume towards a place we love, and are showing off to a newcomer: "Yes, I thought you'd like this view, dearest; isn't it wonderful, wonderful? That's Assisi over yonder, that strange white town that clings by its eyelashes to the sloping hill-side: and those are the snowclad heights of the Gran Sasso beyond; and that's Montefalco to the extreme right, where the sunset gleam just catches the hill-top."

His words struck dumb horror into Herminia's soul. Poor child, how she shrank at it! It was clear, then, instead of being shocked and disgusted, Alan positively admired this human Sahara. With an effort she gulped down her tears and her sighs, and pretended to look with interest in the directions he pointed. SHE could see nothing in it all but dry hill-sides, crowned with still drier towns; unimagined stretches of sultry suburb; devouring wastes of rubbish and foul immemorial kitchen-middens. And the very fact that for Alan's sake she couldn't bear to say so—seeing how pleased and proud he was of Perugia, as if it had been built from his own design—made the bitterness of her disappointment more difficult to endure. She would have given anything at that moment for an ounce of human sympathy.

She had to learn in time to do without it.

They spent that night at the comfortable hotel, perhaps the best in Italy. Next morning, they were to go hunting for apartments in the town, where Alan knew of a suite that would exactly suit them. After dinner, in the twilight, filled with his artistic joy at being back in Perugia, his beloved Perugia, he took Herminia out for a stroll, with a light wrap round her head, on the terrace of the Prefettura. The air blew fresh and cool now with a certain mountain sharpness; for, as Alan assured her with pride, they stood seventeen hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean. The moon had risen; the sunset glow had not yet died off the slopes of the Assisi hill-sides. It streamed through the perforated belfry of San Domenico; it steeped in rose-color the slender and turreted shaft of San Pietro, "Perugia's Pennon," the Arrowhead of Umbria. It gilded the gaunt houses that jut out upon the spine of the Borgo hill into the valley of the Tiber. Beyond, rose shadowy Apennines, on whose aerial flanks towns and villages shone out clear in the mellow moonlight. Far away on their peaks faint specks of twinkling fire marked indistinguishable sites of high hill-top castles.

Alan turned to her proudly. "Well, what do you think of that?" he asked with truly personal interest.

Herminia could only gasp out in a half reluctant way, "It's a beautiful view, Alan. Beautiful; beautiful; beautiful!"

But she felt conscious to herself it owed its beauty in the main to the fact that the twilight obscured so much of it. To-morrow morning, the bare hills would stand out once more in all their pristine bareness; the white roads would shine forth as white and dusty as ever; the obtrusive rubbish heaps would press themselves at every turn upon eye and nostril. She hated the place, to say the truth; it was a terror to her to think she had to stop so long in it.

Most famous towns, in fact, need to be twice seen: the first time briefly to face the inevitable disappointment to our expectations; the second time, at leisure, to reconstruct and appraise the surviving reality. Imagination so easily beggars performance. Rome, Cairo, the Nile, are obvious examples; the grand exceptions are Venice and Florence,—in a lesser degree, Bruges, Munich, Pisa. As for Umbria, 'tis a poor thing; our own Devon snaps her fingers at it.

Moreover, to say the truth, Herminia was too fresh to Italy to appreciate the smaller or second-rate towns at their real value. Even northerners love Florence and Venice at first sight; those take their hearts by storm; but Perugia, Siena, Orvieto, are an acquired taste, like olives and caviare, and it takes time to acquire it. Alan had not made due allowance for this psychological truth of the northern natures. A Celt in essence, thoroughly Italianate himself, and with a deep love for the picturesque, which often makes men insensible to dirt and discomfort, he expected to Italianize Herminia too rapidly. Herminia, on the other hand, belonged more strictly to the intellectual and somewhat inartistic English type. The picturesque alone did not suffice for her. Cleanliness and fresh air were far dearer to her soul than the quaintest street corners, the oddest old archways; she pined in Perugia for a green English hillside.

The time, too, was unfortunate, after no rain for weeks; for rainlessness, besides doubling the native stock of dust, brings out to the full the ancestral Etruscan odors of Perugia. So, when next morning Herminia found herself installed in a dingy flat, in a morose palazzo, in the main street of the city, she was glad that Alan insisted on going out alone to make needful purchases of groceries and provisions, because it gave her a chance of flinging herself on her bed in a perfect agony of distress and disappointment, and having a good cry, all alone, at the aspect of the home where she was to pass so many eventful weeks of her existence.

Dusty, gusty Perugia! O baby, to be born for the freeing of woman, was it here, was it here you must draw your first breath, in an air polluted by the vices of centuries!

XI

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 mediaeval 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-colored,—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 naive 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 to-morrow.—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 legitimatize 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 realize 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 stanch 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."

XII

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 savior. 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 favor, 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 honorably 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 sympathize 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,—gray 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 sympathize 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.