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Chapter XVII.
And yet our Herminia was a woman after all. Some three years
later, when Harvey Kynaston came to visit her one day, and told her
he was really going to be married,—what sudden thrill was this
that passed through and through her. Her heart stood still. She
was aware that she regretted the comparative loss of a very near
and dear acquaintance.
She knew she was quite wrong. It was the leaven of slavery. But
these monopolist instincts, which have wrought more harm in the
world we live in than fire or sword or pestilence or tempest,
hardly die at all as yet in a few good men, and die, fighting hard
for life, even in the noblest women.
She reasoned with herself against so hateful a feeling. Though she
knew the truth, she found it hard to follow. No man indeed is
truly civilized till he can say in all sincerity to every woman of
all the women he loves, to every woman of all the women who love
him, "Give me what you can of your love and of yourself; but never
strive for my sake to deny any love, to strangle any impulse that
pants for breath within you. Give me what you can, while you can,
without grudging, but the moment you feel you love me no more,
don't pollute your own body by yielding it up to a man you have
ceased to desire; don't do injustice to your own prospective
children by giving them a father whom you no longer respect, or
admire, or yearn for. Guard your chastity well. Be mine as much
as you will, as long as you will, to such extent as you will, but
before all things be your own; embrace and follow every instinct of
pure love that nature, our mother, has imparted within you." No
woman, in turn, is truly civilized till she can say to every man of
all the men she loves, of all the men who love her, "Give me what
you can of your love, and of yourself; but don't think I am so
vile, and so selfish, and so poor as to desire to monopolize you.
Respect me enough never to give me your body without giving me your
heart; never to make me the mother of children whom you desire not
and love not." When men and women can say that alike, the world
will be civilized. Until they can say it truly, the world will be
as now a jarring battlefield for the monopolist instincts.
Those jealous and odious instincts have been the bane of humanity.
They have given us the stiletto, the Morgue, the bowie-knife. Our
race must inevitably in the end outlive them. The test of man's
plane in the scale of being is how far he has outlived them. They
are surviving relics of the ape and tiger. But we must let the ape
and tiger die. We must cease to be Calibans. We must begin to be
human.
Patriotism is the one of these lowest vices which most often
masquerades in false garb as a virtue. But what after all IS
patriotism? "My country, right or wrong, and just because it is my
country!" This is clearly nothing more than collective selfishness.
Often enough, indeed, it is not even collective. It means merely,
"MY business-interests against the business-interests of other
people, and let the taxes of my fellow-citizens pay to support
them." At other times it means pure pride of race, and pure *** of
conquest; "MY country against other countries; MY army and navy
against other fighters; MY right to annex unoccupied territory
against the equal right of all other peoples; MY power to oppress
all weaker nationalities, all inferior races." It NEVER means or
can mean anything good or true. For if a cause be just, like
Ireland's, or once Italy's, then 'tis a good man's duty to espouse
it with warmth, be it his own or another's. And if a cause be bad,
then 'tis a good man's duty to oppose it, tooth and nail,
irrespective of your patriotism. True, a good man will feel more
sensitively anxious that strict justice should be done by the
particular community of which chance has made him a component member
than by any others; but then, people who feel acutely this joint
responsibility of all the citizens to uphold the moral right are not
praised as patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To urge that our
own country should strive with all its might to be better, higher,
purer, nobler, more generous than other countries,—the only kind of
patriotism worth a moment's thought in a righteous man's eyes, is
accounted by most men both wicked and foolish.
Then comes the monopolist instinct of property. That, on the face
of it, is a baser and more sordid one. For patriotism at least can
lay claim to some sort of delusive expansiveness beyond mere
individual interest; whereas property stops short at the narrowest
limits of personality. It is no longer "Us against the world!" but
"Me against my fellow-citizens!" It is the last word of the
intercivic war in its most hideous avatar. Look how it scars the
fair face of our common country with its antisocial notice-boards,
"Trespassers will be prosecuted." It says in effect, "This is my
land. As I believe, God made it; but I have acquired it, and
tabooed it to myself, for my own enjoyment. The grass on the wold
grows green; but only for me. The mountains rise glorious in the
morning sun; no foot of man, save mine and my gillies' shall tread
them. The waterfalls leap white from the ledge in the glen; avaunt
there, non-possessors; your eye shall never see them. For you the
muddy street; for me, miles of upland. All this is my own. And I
choose to monopolize it."
Or is it the capitalist? "I will add field to field," he cries
aloud, despite his own Scripture; "I will join railway to railway.
I will juggle into my own hands all the instruments for the
production of wealth that my cunning can lay hold of; and I will
use them for my own purposes against producer and consumer alike
with impartial egoism. Corn and coal shall lie in the hollow of my
hand. I will enrich myself by making dear by craft the necessaries
of life; the poor shall lack, that I may roll down fair streets in
needless luxury. Let them starve, and feed me!" That temper, too,
humanity must outlive. And those who are incapable of outliving it
of themselves must be taught by stern lessons, as in the splendid
uprising of the spirit of man in France, that their race has
outstripped them.
Next comes the monopoly of human life, the hideous wrong of
slavery. That, thank goodness, is now gone. 'Twas the vilest of
them all—the nakedest assertion of the monopolist platform:—"You
live, not for yourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregard
your claims to your own body and soul, and use you as my chattel."
That worst form has died. It withered away before the moral
indignation even of existing humanity. We have the satisfaction of
seeing one dragon slain, of knowing that one monopolist instinct at
least is now fairly bred out of us.
Last, and hardest of all to eradicate in our midst, comes the
monopoly of the human heart, which is known as marriage. Based upon
the primitive habit of felling the woman with a blow, stunning her
by repeated strokes of the club or spear, and dragging her off by
the hair of her head as a slave to her captor's hut or rock-shelter,
this ugly and barbaric form of serfdom has come in our own time by
some strange caprice to be regarded as of positively divine origin.
The Man says now to himself, "This woman is mine. Law and the Church
have bestowed her on me. Mine for better, for worse; mine, drunk or
sober. If she ventures to have a heart or a will of her own, woe
betide her! I have tabooed her for life: let any other man touch
her, let her so much as cast eyes on any other man to admire or
desire him—and, knife, dagger, or law-court, they shall both of
them answer for it." There you have in all its native deformity
another monopolist instinct—the deepest-seated of all, the
grimmest, the most vindictive. "She is not yours," says the moral
philosopher of the new dispensation; "she is her own; release her!
The Turk hales his offending slave, sews her up in a sack, and casts
her quick into the eddying Bosphorus. The Christian Englishman, with
more lingering torture, sets spies on her life, drags what he thinks
her shame before a prying court, and divorces her with contumely.
All this is monopoly, and essentially slavery. Mankind must outlive
it on its way up to civilization."
And then the Woman, thus taught by her lords, has begun to retort
in these latter days by endeavoring to enslave the Man in return.
Unable to conceive the bare idea of freedom for both sexes alike,
she seeks equality in an equal slavery. That she will never
achieve. The future is to the free. We have transcended serfdom.
Women shall henceforth be the equals of men, not by levelling down,
but by levelling up; not by fettering the man, but by elevating,
emancipating, unshackling the woman.
All this Herminia knew well. All these things she turned over in
her mind by herself on the evening of the day when Harvey Kynaston
came to tell her of his approaching marriage. Why, then, did she
feel it to some extent a disappointment? Why so flat at his
happiness? Partly, she said to herself, because it is difficult to
live down in a single generation the jealousies and distrusts
engendered in our hearts by so many ages of harem life. But more
still, she honestly believed, because it is hard to be a free soul
in an enslaved community. No unit can wholly sever itself from the
social organism of which it is a corpuscle. If all the world were
like herself, her lot would have been different. Affection would
have been free; her yearnings for sympathy would have been filled
to the full by Harvey Kynaston or some other. As it was, she had
but that one little fraction of a man friend to solace her; to
resign him altogether to another woman, leaving herself bankrupt of
love, was indeed a bitter trial to her.
Yet for her principles' sake and Dolly's, she never let Harvey
Kynaston or his wife suspect it; as long as she lived, she was a
true and earnest friend at all times to both of them.
End of Chapter XVII Chapter XVIII.
Meanwhile, Dolores was growing up to woman's estate. And she was
growing into a tall, a graceful, an exquisitely beautiful woman.
Yet in some ways Herminia had reason to be dissatisfied with her
daughter's development. Day by day she watched for signs of the
expected apostolate. Was Dolores pressing forward to the mark for
the prize of her high calling? Her mother half doubted it. Slowly
and regretfully, as the growing girl approached the years when she
might be expected to think for herself, Herminia began to perceive
that the child of so many hopes, of so many aspirations, the child
pre-destined to regenerate humanity, was thinking for herself—in a
retrograde direction. Incredible as it seemed to Herminia, in the
daughter of such a father and such a mother, Dolores' ideas—nay,
worse her ideals—were essentially commonplace. Not that she had
much opportunity of imbibing commonplace opinions from any outside
source; she redeveloped them from within by a pure effort of
atavism. She had reverted to lower types. She had thrown back to
the Philistine.
Heredity of mental and moral qualities is a precarious matter.
These things lie, as it were, on the topmost plane of character;
they smack of the individual, and are therefore far less likely to
persist in offspring than the deeper-seated and better-established
peculiarities of the family, the clan, the race, or the species.
They are idiosyncratic. Indeed, when we remember how greatly the
mental and moral faculties differ from brother to brother, the
product of the same two parental factors, can we wonder that they
differ much more from father to son, the product of one like factor
alone, diluted by the addition of a relatively unknown quality, the
maternal influence? However this may be, at any rate, Dolores
early began to strike out for herself all the most ordinary and
stereotyped opinions of British respectability. It seemed as if
they sprang up in her by unmitigated reversion. She had never
heard in the society of her mother's lodgings any but the freest
and most rational ideas; yet she herself seemed to hark back, of
internal congruity, to the lower and vulgarer moral plane of her
remoter ancestry. She showed her individuality only by evolving
for herself all the threadbare platitudes of ordinary convention.
Moreover, it is not parents who have most to do with moulding the
sentiments and opinions of their children. From the beginning,
Dolly thought better of the landlady's views and ideas than of her
mother's. When she went to school, she considered the moral
standpoint of the other girls a great deal more sensible than the
moral standpoint of Herminia's attic. She accepted the beliefs and
opinions of her schoolfellows because they were natural and
congenial to her character. In short, she had what the world calls
common-sense: she revolted from the unpractical Utopianism of her
mother.
From a very early age, indeed, this false note in Dolly had begun
to make itself heard. While she was yet quite a child, Herminia
noticed with a certain tender but shrinking regret that Dolly
seemed to attach undue importance to the mere upholsteries and
equipages of life,—to rank, wealth, title, servants, carriages,
jewelry. At first, to be sure, Herminia hoped this might prove but
the passing foolishness of childhood: as Dolly grew up, however, it
became clearer each day that the defect was in the grain—that
Dolly's whole mind was incurably and congenitally aristocratic or
snobbish. She had that mean admiration for birth, position,
adventitious advantages, which is the mark of the beast in the
essentially aristocratic or snobbish nature. She admired people
because they were rich, because they were high-placed, because they
were courted, because they were respected; not because they were
good, because they were wise, because they were noble-natured,
because they were respect-worthy.
But even that was not all. In time, Herminia began to perceive
with still profounder sorrow that Dolly had no spontaneous care or
regard for righteousness. Right and wrong meant to her only what
was usual and the opposite. She seemed incapable of considering
the intrinsic nature of any act in itself apart from the praise or
blame meted out to it by society. In short, she was sunk in the
same ineffable slough of moral darkness as the ordinary inhabitant
of the morass of London.
To Herminia this slow discovery, as it dawned bit by bit upon her,
put the final thorn in her crown of martyrdom. The child on whose
education she had spent so much pains, the child whose success in
the deep things of life was to atone for her own failure, the child
who was born to be the apostle of freedom to her sisters in
darkness, had turned out in the most earnest essentials of
character a complete disappointment, and had ruined the last hope
that bound her to existence.
Bitterer trials remained. Herminia had acted through life to a
great extent with the idea ever consciously present to her mind
that she must answer to Dolly for every act and every feeling. She
had done all she did with a deep sense of responsibility. Now it
loomed by degrees upon her aching heart that Dolly's verdict would
in almost every case be a hostile one. The daughter was growing
old enough to question and criticise her mother's proceedings; she
was beginning to understand that some mysterious difference marked
off her own uncertain position in life from the solid position of
the children who surrounded her—the children born under those
special circumstances which alone the man-made law chooses to stamp
with the seal of its recognition. Dolly's curiosity was shyly
aroused as to her dead father's family. Herminia had done her best
to prepare betimes for this inevitable result by setting before her
child, as soon as she could understand it, the true moral doctrine
as to the duties of parenthood. But Dolly's own development
rendered all such steps futile. There is no more silly and
persistent error than the belief of parents that they can influence
to any appreciable extent the moral ideas and impulses of their
children. These things have their springs in the bases of
character: they are the flower of individuality; and they cannot be
altered or affected after birth by the foolishness of preaching.
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, you
will find soon enough he will choose his own course for himself and
depart from it.
Already when Dolly was a toddling little mite and met her mother's
father in the church in Marylebone, it had struck her as odd that
while they themselves were so poor and ill-clad, her grandpapa
should be such a grand old gentleman of such a dignified aspect.
As she grew older and older, and began to understand a little more
the world she lived in, she wondered yet more profoundly how it
could happen, if her grandpapa was indeed the Very Reverend, the
Dean of Dunwich, that her mamma should be an outcast from her
father's church, and scarcely well seen in the best carriage
company. She had learnt that deans are rather grand people—almost
as much so as admirals; that they wear shovel-hats to distinguish
them from the common ruck of rectors; that they lived in fine
houses in a cathedral close; and that they drive in a victoria with
a coachman in livery. So much essential knowledge of the church of
Christ she had gained for herself by personal observation; for
facts like these were what interested Dolly. She couldn't
understand, then, why she and her mother should live precariously
in a very small attic; should never be visited by her mother's
brothers, one of whom she knew to be a Prebendary of Old Sarum,
while the other she saw gazetted as a Colonel of Artillery; and
should be totally ignored by her mother's sister, Ermyntrude, who
lolled in a landau down the sunny side of Bond Street.
At first, indeed, it only occurred to Dolly that her mother's
extreme and advanced opinions had induced a social breach between
herself and the orthodox members of her family. Even that Dolly
resented; why should mamma hold ideas of her own which shut her
daughter out from the worldly advantages enjoyed to the full by the
rest of her kindred? Dolly had no particular religious ideas; the
subject didn't interest her; and besides, she thought the New
Testament talked about rich and poor in much the same unpractical
nebulous way that mamma herself did—in fact, she regarded it with
some veiled contempt as a rather sentimental radical publication.
But, she considered, for all that, that it was probably true enough
as far as the facts and the theology went; and she couldn't
understand why a person like mamma should cut herself off
contumaciously from the rest of the world by presuming to
disbelieve a body of doctrine which so many rich and well-gaitered
bishops held worthy of credence. All stylish society accepted the
tenets of the Church of England. But in time it began to occur to
her that there might be some deeper and, as she herself would have
said, more disgraceful reason for her mother's alienation from so
respectable a family. For to Dolly, that was disgraceful which the
world held to be so. Things in themselves, apart from the world's
word, had for her no existence. Step by step, as she grew up to
blushing womanhood, it began to strike her with surprise that her
grandfather's name had been, like her own, Barton. "Did you marry
your cousin, mamma?" she asked Herminia one day quite suddenly.
And Herminia, flushing scarlet at the unexpected question, the
first with which Dolly had yet ventured to approach that dangerous
quicksand, replied with a deadly thrill, "No, my darling. Why do
you ask me?"
"Because," Dolly answered abashed, "I just wanted to know why your
name should be Barton, the same as poor grandpapa's."
Herminia didn't dare to say too much just then. "Your dear
father," she answered low, "was not related to me in any way."
Dolly accepted the tone as closing the discussion for the present;
but the episode only strengthened her underlying sense of a mystery
somewhere in the matter to unravel.
In time, Herminia sent her child to a day-school. Though she had
always taught Dolly herself as well as she was able, she felt it a
matter of duty, as her daughter grew up, to give her something more
than the stray ends of time in a busy journalist's moments of
leisure. At the school, where Dolly was received without question,
on Miss Smith-Water's recommendation, she found herself thrown much
into the society of other girls, drawn for the most part from the
narrowly Mammon-worshipping ranks of London professional society.
Here, her native tendencies towards the real religion of England,
the united worship of Success and Respectability, were encouraged
to the utmost. But she noticed at times with a shy shrinking that
some few of the girls had heard vague rumors about her mother as a
most equivocal person, who didn't accept all the current
superstitions, and were curious to ask her questions as to her
family and antecedents. Crimson with shame, Dolly parried such
enquiries as best she could; but she longed all the more herself to
pierce this dim mystery. Was it a runaway match?—with the groom,
perhaps, or the footman? Only the natural shamefacedness of a
budding girl in prying into her mother's most domestic secrets
prevented Dolores from asking Herminia some day point-blank all
about it.
But she was gradually becoming aware that some strange atmosphere
of doubt surrounded her birth and her mother's history. It filled
her with sensitive fears and self-conscious hesitations.
And if the truth must be told, Dolly never really returned her
mother's profound affection. It is often so. The love which
parents lavish upon their children, the children repay, not to
parents themselves, but to the next generation. Only when we
become fathers or mothers in our turn do we learn what our fathers
and mothers have done for us. Thus it was with Dolly. When once
the first period of childish dependence was over, she regarded
Herminia with a smouldering distrust and a secret dislike that
concealed itself beneath a mask of unfelt caresses. In her heart
of hearts, she owed her mother a grudge for not having put her in a
position in life where she could drive in a carriage with a
snarling pug and a clipped French poodle, like Aunt Ermyntrude's
children. She grew up, smarting under a sullen sense of injustice,
all the deeper because she was compelled to stifle it in the
profoundest recesses of her own heart.
End of Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX.
When Dolly was seventeen, a pink wild rose just unrolling its
petals, a very great event occurred in her history. She received
an invitation to go and stop with some friends in the country.
The poor child's life had been in a sense so uneventful that the
bare prospect of this visit filled her soul beforehand with
tremulous anticipation. To be sure, Dolly Barton had always lived
in the midmost centre of the Movement in London; she had known
authors, artists, socialists, the cream of our race; she had been
brought up in close intercourse with the men and women who are
engaged in revolutionizing and remodelling humanity. But this very
fact that she had always lived in the Thick of Things made a change
to the Thin of Things only by so much the more delicious and
enchanting. Not that Dolores had not seen a great deal, too, of
the country. Poor as they were, her mother had taken her to cheap
little seaside nooks for a week or two of each summer; she had made
pilgrimages almost every Sunday in spring or autumn to Leith Hill
or Mapledurham; she had even strained her scanty resources to the
utmost to afford Dolly an occasional outing in the Ardennes or in
Normandy. But what gave supreme importance to this coming visit
was the special fact that Dolly was now for the first time in her
life to find herself "in society."
Among the friends she had picked up at her Marylebone day-school
were two west-country girls, private boarders of the head-mistress's,
who came from the neighborhood of Combe Neville in Dorset. Their
name was Compson, and their father was rector of their native
village, Upcombe. Dolly liked them very much, and was proud
of their acquaintance, because they were reckoned about the most
distinguished pupils in the school, their mother being the niece of
a local viscount. Among girls in middle-class London sets, even so
remote a connection with the title-bearing classes is counted for a
distinction. So when Winnie Compson asked Dolly to go and stop with
her at her father's rectory during three whole weeks of the summer
holidays, Dolly felt that now at last by pure force of native worth
she was rising to her natural position in society. It flattered her
that Winnie should select her for such an honor.
The preparations for that visit cost Dolly some weeks of thought
and effort. The occasion demanded it. She was afraid she had no
frocks good enough for such a grand house as the Compsons.
"Grand" was indeed a favorite epithet of Dolly's; she applied it
impartially to everything which had to do, as she conceived, with
the life of the propertied and privileged classes. It was a word
at once of cherished and revered meaning—the shibboleth of
her religion. It implied to her mind something remote and
unapproachable, yet to be earnestly striven after with all the
forces at her disposal. Even Herminia herself stretched a point in
favor of an occasion which she could plainly see Dolly regarded as
so important; she managed to indulge her darling in a couple of
dainty new afternoon dresses, which touched for her soul the very
utmost verge of allowable luxury. The materials were oriental; the
cut was the dressmaker's—not home-built, as usual. Dolly looked
so brave in them, with her rich chestnut hair and her creamy
complexion,—a touch, Herminia thought, of her Italian birthplace,—that
the mother's full heart leapt up to look at her. It almost made
Herminia wish she was rich—and anti-social, like the rich
people—in order that she might be able to do ample justice to the
exquisite grace of Dolly's unfolding figure. Tall, lissome,
supple, clear of limb and light of footstep, she was indeed a girl
any mother might have been proud of.
On the day she left London, Herminia thought to herself she had
never seen her child look so absolutely lovely. The unwonted union
of blue eyes with that olive-gray skin gave a tinge of wayward
shyness to her girlish beauty. The golden locks had ripened to
nut-brown, but still caught stray gleams of nestling sunlight.
'Twas with a foreboding regret that Herminia kissed Dolly on both
peach-bloom cheeks at parting. She almost fancied her child must
be slipping from her motherly grasp when she went off so blithely
to visit these unknown friends, away down in Dorsetshire. Yet
Dolly had so few amusements of the sort young girls require that
Herminia was overjoyed this opportunity should have come to her.
She reproached herself not a little in her sensitive heart for even
feeling sad at Dolly's joyous departure. Yet to Dolly it was a
delight to escape from the atmosphere of Herminia's lodgings.
Those calm heights chilled her.
The Compsons' house was quite as "grand" in the reality as Dolly
had imagined it. There was a man-servant in a white tie to wait at
table, and the family dressed every evening for dinner. Yet, much
to her surprise, Dolly found from the first the grandeur did not in
the least incommode her. On the contrary, she enjoyed it. She
felt forthwith she was to the manner born. This was clearly the
life she was intended by nature to live, and might actually have
been living—she, the granddaughter of so grand a man as the late
Dean of Dunwich—had it not been for poor Mamma's ridiculous
fancies. Mamma was so faddy! Before Dolly had spent three whole
days at the rectory, she talked just as the Compsons did; she
picked up by pure instinct the territorial slang of the county
families. One would have thought, to hear her discourse, she had
dressed for dinner every night of her life, and passed her days in
the society of the beneficed clergy.
But even that did not exhaust the charm of Upcombe for Dolly. For
the first time in her life, she saw something of men,—real men,
with horses and dogs and guns,—men who went out partridge shooting
in the season and rode to hounds across country, not the pale
abstractions of cultured humanity who attended the Fabian Society
meetings or wrote things called articles in the London papers. Her
mother's friends wore soft felt hats and limp woollen collars; these
real men were richly clad in tweed suits and fine linen. Dolly was
charmed with them all, but especially with one handsome and manly
young fellow named Walter Brydges, the stepson and ward of a
neighboring parson. "How you talked with him at tennis to-day!"
Winnie Compson said to her friend, as they sat on the edge of
Dolly's bed one evening. "He seemed quite taken with you."
A pink spot of pleasure glowed on Dolly's round cheek to think that
a real young man, in good society, whom she met at so grand a house
as the Compsons', should seem to be quite taken with her.
"Who is he, Winnie?" she asked, trying to look less self-conscious.
"He's extremely good-looking."
"Oh, he's Mr. Hawkshaw's stepson, over at Combe Mary," Winnie
answered with a nod. "Mr. Hawkshaw's the vicar there till Mamma's
nephew is ready to take the living—what they call a warming-pan.
But Walter Brydges is Mrs. Hawkshaw's son by her first husband.
Old Mr. Brydges was the squire of Combe Mary, and Walter's his only
child. He's very well off. You might do worse, dear. He's
considered quite a catch down in this part of the country."
"How old is he?" Dolly asked, innocently enough, standing up by the
bedside in her dainty white nightgown. But Winnie caught at her
meaning with the preternatural sharpness of the girl brought up in
immediate contact with the landed interest. "Oh, he's of age," she
answered quickly, with a knowing nod. "He's come into the
property; he has nobody on earth but himself to consult about his
domestic arrangements."
Dolly was young; Dolly was pretty; Dolly's smile won the world;
Dolly was still at the sweetest and most susceptible of ages.
Walter Brydges was well off; Walter Brydges was handsome; Walter
Brydges had all the glamour of a landed estate, and an Oxford
education. He was a young Greek god in a Norfolk shooting-jacket.
Moreover, he was a really good and pleasant young fellow. What
wonder, therefore, if before a week was out, Dolly was very really
and seriously in love with him? And what wonder if Walter Brydges
in turn, caught by that maiden glance, was in love with Dolly? He
had every excuse, for she was lithe, and beautiful, and a joyous
companion; besides being, as the lady's maid justly remarked, a
perfect lady.
One day, after Dolly had been a fortnight at Upcombe, the Compsons
gave a picnic in the wild Combe undercliff. 'Tis a broken wall of
chalk, tumbled picturesquely about in huge shattered masses, and
deliciously overgrown with ferns and blackthorn and golden clusters
of close-creeping rock-rose. Mazy paths thread tangled labyrinths of
fallen rock, or wind round tall clumps of holly-bush and bramble.
They lighted their fire under the lee of one such buttress of broken
cliff, whose summit was festooned with long sprays of clematis, or
"old man's beard," as the common west-country name expressively
phrases it. Thistledown hovered on the basking air. There they sat
and drank their tea, couched on beds of fern or propped firm against
the rock; and when tea was over, they wandered off, two and two,
ostensibly for nothing, but really for the true business of the
picnic—to afford the young men and maidens of the group some chance
of enjoying, unspied, one another's society.
Dolly and Walter Brydges strolled off by themselves toward the
rocky shore. There Walter showed her where a brook bubbled clear
from the fountain-head; by its brink, blue veronicas grew, and tall
yellow loosestrife, and tasselled purple heads of great English
eupatory. Bending down to the stream he picked a little bunch of
forget-me-nots, and handed them to her. Dolly pretended
unconsciously to pull the dainty blossoms to pieces, as she sat on
the clay bank hard by and talked with him. "Is that how you treat
my poor flowers?" Walter asked, looking askance at her.
Dolly glanced down, and drew back suddenly. "Oh, poor little
things!" she cried, with a quick droop of her long lashes. "I
wasn't thinking what I did." And she darted a shy glance at him.
"If I'd remembered they were forget-me-nots, I don't think I could
have done it."
She looked so sweet and pure in her budding innocence, like a
half-blown water-lily, that the young man, already more than
two-thirds in love, was instantly captivated. "Because they were
forget-me-nots, or because they were MINE, Miss Barton?" he asked
softly, all timorousness.
"Perhaps a little of both," the girl answered, gazing down, and
blushing at each word a still deeper crimson.
The blush showed sweet on that translucent skin. Walter turned to
her with a sudden impulse. "And what are you going to do with them
NOW?" he enquired, holding his breath for joy and half-suppressed
eagerness.
Dolly hesitated a moment with genuine modesty. Then her liking for
the well-knit young man overcame her. With a frightened smile her
hand stole to her bodice; she fixed them in her ***. "Will that
do?" she asked timidly.
"Yes, that WILL do," the young man answered, bending forward and
seizing her soft fingers in his own. "That will do very well.
And, Miss Barton—Dolores—I take it as a sign you don't wholly
dislike me."
"I like you very much," Dolly answered in a low voice, pulling a
rock-rose from a cleft and tearing it nervously to pieces.
"Do you LOVE me, Dolly?" the young man insisted.
Dolly turned her glance to him tenderly, then withdrew it in haste.
"I think I MIGHT, in time," she answered very slowly.
"Then you will be mine, mine, mine?" Walter cried in an ecstasy.
Dolly bent her pretty head in reluctant assent, with a torrent of
inner joy. The sun flashed in her chestnut hair. The triumph of
that moment was to her inexpressible.
But as for Walter Brydges, he seized the blushing face boldly in
his two brown hands, and imprinted upon it at once three respectful
kisses. Then he drew back, half-terrified at his own temerity.
End of Chapter XIX Chapter XX.
From that day forth it was understood at Upcombe that Dolly Barton
was informally engaged to Walter Brydges. Their betrothal would be
announced in the "Morning Post"—"We learn that a marriage has been
arranged," and so forth—as soon as the chosen bride had returned
to town, and communicated the great news in person to her mother.
For reasons of her own, Dolly preferred this delay; she didn't wish
to write on the subject to Herminia. Would mamma go and spoil it
all? she wondered. It would be just like her.
The remaining week of her stay at the rectory was a golden dream of
delight to Dolly. Beyond even the natural ecstasy of first love,
the natural triumph of a brilliant engagement, what visions of
untold splendor danced hourly, day and night, before her dazzled
eyes! What masques of magnificence! county balls, garden parties!
It was heaven to Dolly. She was going to be grander than her
grandest daydream.
Walter took her across one afternoon to Combe Mary, and introduced
her in due form to his mother and his step-father, who found the
pink-and-white girl "so very young," but saw no other grave fault
in her. He even escorted her over the ancestral home of the
masters of Combe Mary, in which they were both to live, and which
the young squire had left vacant of set purpose till he found a
wife to his mind to fill it. 'Twas the ideal crystallized. Rooks
cawed from the high elms; ivy clambered to the gables; the tower of
the village church closed the vista through the avenue. The cup of
Dolly's happiness was full to the brim. She was to dwell in a
manor-house with livery servants of her own, and to dress for
dinner every night of her existence.
On the very last evening of her stay in Dorsetshire, Walter came
round to see her. Mrs. Compson and the girls managed to keep
discreetly out of the young people's way; the rector was in his
study preparing his Sunday sermon, which arduous intellectual
effort was supposed to engage his close attention for five hours or
so weekly. Not a mouse interrupted. So Dolly and her lover had
the field to themselves from eight to ten in the rectory drawing-room.
From the first moment of Walter's entry, Dolly was dimly aware,
womanlike, of something amiss, something altered in his manner.
Not, indeed, that her lover was less affectionate or less tender
than usual,—if anything he seemed rather more so; but his talk was
embarrassed, pre-occupied, spasmodic. He spoke by fits and starts,
and seemed to hold back something. Dolly taxed him with it at
last. Walter tried to put it off upon her approaching departure.
But he was an honest young man, and so bad an actor that Dolly,
with her keen feminine intuitions, at once detected him. "It's
more than that," she said, all regret, leaning forward with a
quick-gathering moisture in her eye, for she really loved him.
"It's more than that, Walter. You've heard something somewhere
that you don't want to tell me."
Walter's color changed at once. He was a man, and therefore but
a poor dissembler. "Well, nothing very much," he admitted,
awkwardly.
Dolly, drew back like one stung; her heart beat fast. "What have
you heard?" she cried trembling; "Walter, Walter, I love you! You
must keep nothing back. Tell me NOW what it is. I can bear to
hear it."
The young man hesitated. "Only something my step-father heard from
a friend last night," he replied, floundering deeper and deeper.
"Nothing at all about you, darling. Only—well—about your
family."
Dolly's face was red as fire. A lump rose in her throat; she
started in horror. Then he had found out the Truth. He had probed
the Mystery.
"Something that makes you sorry you promised to marry me?" she
cried aloud in her despair. Heaven faded before her eyes. What
evil trick could mamma have played her?
As she stood there that moment—proud, crimson, breathless—Walter
Brydges would have married her if her father had been a tinker and
her mother a gipsy girl. He drew her toward him tenderly. "No,
darling," he cried, kissing her, for he was a chivalrous young man,
as he understood chivalry; and to him it was indeed a most cruel
blow to learn that his future wife was born out of lawful wedlock.
"I'm proud of you; I love you. I worship the very ground your
sweet feet tread on. Nothing on earth could make me anything but
grateful and thankful for the gift of your love you're gracious
enough to bestow on me."
But Dolly drew back in alarm. Not on such terms as those. She,
too, had her pride; she, too, had her chivalry. "No, no," she
cried, shrinking. "I don't know what it is. I don't know what it
means. But till I've gone home to London and asked about it from
mother,—oh, Walter, we two are no longer engaged. You are free
from your promise."
She said it proudly; she said it bravely. She said it with womanly
grace and dignity. Something of Herminia shone out in her that
moment. No man should ever take her—to the grandest home—unless
he took her at her full worth, pleased and proud to win her.
Walter soothed and coaxed; but Dolores stood firm. Like a rock in
the sea, no assault could move her. As things stood at present,
she cried, they were no longer engaged. After she had seen her
mother and talked it all over, she would write to him once more,
and tell him what she thought of it.
And, crimson to the finger-tips with shame and modesty, she rushed
from his presence up to her own dark bed-room.
End of Chapter XX
Chapter XXI.
Next morning early, Dolly left Combe Neville on her way to London.
When she reached the station, Walter was on the platform with a
bunch of white roses. He handed them to her deferentially as she
took her seat in the third-class carriage; and so sobered was Dolly
by this great misfortune that she forgot even to feel a passing
pang of shame that Walter should see her travel in that humble
fashion. "Remember," he whispered in her ear, as the train steamed
out, "we are still engaged; I hold you to your promise."
And Dolly, blushing maidenly shame and distress, shook her head
decisively. "Not now," she answered. "I must wait till I know the
truth. It has always been kept from me. And now I WILL know it."
She had not slept that night. All the way up to London, she kept
turning her doubt over. The more she thought of it, the deeper it
galled her. Her wrath waxed bitter against Herminia for this evil
turn she had wrought. The smouldering anger of years blazed forth
at last. Had she blighted her daughter's life, and spoiled so fair
a future by obstinate adherence to those preposterous ideas of
hers?
Never in her life had Dolly loved her mother. At best, she had
felt towards her that contemptuous toleration which inferior minds
often extend to higher ones. And now—why, she hated her.
In London, as it happened, that very morning, Herminia, walking
across Regent's Park, had fallen in with Harvey Kynaston, and their
talk had turned upon this self-same problem.
"What will you do when she asks you about it, as she must, sooner
or later?" the man inquired.
And Herminia, smiling that serene sweet smile of hers, made answer
at once without a second's hesitation, "I shall confess the whole
truth to her."
"But it might be so bad for her," Harvey Kynaston went on. And
then he proceeded to bring up in detail casuistic objections on
the score of a young girl's modesty; all of which fell flat on
Herminia's more honest and consistent temperament.
"I believe in the truth," she said simply; "and I'm never afraid of
it. I don't think a lie, or even a suppression, can ever be good
in the end for any one. The Truth shall make you Free. That one
principle in life can guide one through everything."
In the evening, when Dolly came home, her mother ran out proudly
and affectionately to kiss her. But Dolly drew back her face with
a gesture of displeasure, nay, almost of shrinking. "Not now,
mother!" she cried. "I have something to ask you about. Till I
know the truth, I can never kiss you."
Herminia's face turned deadly white; she knew it had come at last.
But still she never flinched. "You shall hear the truth from me,
darling," she said, with a gentle touch. "You have always heard
it."
They passed under the doorway and up the stairs in silence. As
soon as they were in the sitting-room, Dolly fronted Herminia
fiercely. "Mother," she cried, with the air of a wild creature at
bay, "were you married to my father?"
Herminia's cheek blanched, and her pale lips quivered as she nerved
herself to answer; but she answered bravely, "No, darling, I was
not. It has always been contrary to my principles to marry."
"YOUR principles!" Dolores echoed in a tone of ineffable, scorn.
"YOUR principles! Your PRINCIPLES! All my life has been
sacrificed to you and your principles!" Then she turned on her
madly once more. "And WHO was my father?" she burst out in her
agony.
Herminia never paused. She must tell her the truth. "Your
father's name was Alan Merrick," she answered, steadying herself
with one hand on the table. "He died at Perugia before you were
born there. He was a son of Sir Anthony Merrick, the great doctor
in Harley Street."
The worst was out. Dolly stood still and gasped. Hot horror
flooded her burning cheeks. Illegitimate! illegitimate!
Dishonored from her birth! A mark for every cruel tongue to aim
at! Born in shame and disgrace! And then, to think what she might
have been, but for her mother's madness! The granddaughter of two
such great men in their way as the Dean of Dunwich and Sir Anthony
Merrick.
She drew back, all aghast. Shame and agony held her. Something of
maiden modesty burned bright in her cheek and down her very neck.
Red waves coursed through her. How on earth after this could she
face Walter Brydges?
"Mother, mother!" she broke out, sobbing, after a moment's pause,
"oh, what have you done? What have you done? A cruel, cruel
mother you have been to me. How can I ever forgive you?"
Herminia gazed at her appalled. It was a natural tragedy. There
was no way out of it. She couldn't help seizing the thing at once,
in a lightning flash of sympathy, from Dolly's point of view, too.
Quick womanly instinct made her heart bleed for her daughter's
manifest shame and horror.
"Dolly, Dolly," the agonized mother cried, flinging herself upon
her child's mercy, as it were; "Don't be *** me; don't be hard
on me! My darling, how could I ever guess you would look at it
like this? How could I ever guess my daughter and his would see
things for herself in so different a light from the light we saw
them in?"
"You had no right to bring me into the world at all," Dolly cried,
growing fiercer as her mother grew more unhappy. "If you did, you
should have put me on an equality with other people."
"Dolly," Herminia moaned, wringing her hands in her despair, "my
child, my darling, how I have loved you! how I have watched over
you! Your life has been for years the one thing I had to live for.
I dreamed you would be just such another one as myself. EQUAL with
other people! Why, I thought I was giving you the noblest heritage
living woman ever yet gave the child of her ***. I thought you
would be proud of it, as I myself would have been proud. I thought
you would accept it as a glorious birthright, a supreme privilege.
How could I foresee you would turn aside from your mother's creed?
How could I anticipate you would be ashamed of being the first
free-born woman ever begotten in England? 'Twas a blessing I meant
to give you, and you have made a curse of it."
"YOU have made a curse of it!" Dolores answered, rising and glaring
at her. "You have blighted my life for me. A good man and true
was going to make me his wife. After this, how can I dare to palm
myself off upon him?"
She swept from the room. Though broken with sorrow, her step was
resolute. Herminia followed her to her bed-room. There Dolly sat
long on the edge of the bed, crying silently, silently, and rocking
herself up and down like one mad with agony. At last, in one fierce
burst, she relieved her burdened soul by pouring out to her mother
the whole tale of her meeting with Walter Brydges. Though she hated
her, she must tell her. Herminia listened with deep shame. It
brought the color back into her own pale cheek to think any man
should deem he was performing an act of chivalrous self-devotion in
marrying Herminia Barton's unlawful daughter. Alan Merrick's child!
The child of so many hopes! The baby that was born to regenerate
humanity!
At last, in a dogged way, Dolly rose once more. She put on her hat
and jacket.
"Where are you going?" her mother asked, terrified.
"I am going out," Dolores answered, "to the post, to telegraph to
him."
She worded her telegram briefly but proudly:
"My mother has told me all. I understand your feeling. Our
arrangement is annulled. Good-by. You have been kind to me."
An hour or two later, a return telegram came:—
"Our engagement remains exactly as it was. Nothing is changed. I
hold you to your promise. All tenderest messages. Letter
follows."
That answer calmed Dolly's mind a little. She began to think after
all,—if Walter still wanted her,—she loved him very much; she
could hardly dismiss him.
When she rose to go to bed, Herminia, very wistful, held out her
white face to be kissed as usual. She held it out tentatively.
Worlds trembled in the balance; but Dolly drew herself back with a
look of offended dignity. "Never!" she answered in a firm voice.
"Never again while I live. You are not fit to receive a pure
girl's kisses."
And two women lay awake all that ensuing night sobbing low on their
pillows in the Marylebone lodging-house.
End of Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII.
It was half-past nine o'clock next morning when the man-servant at
Sir Anthony Merrick's in Harley Street brought up to his master's
room a plain hand-written card on which he read the name, "Dolores
Barton."
"Does the girl want to blackmail me?" Sir Anthony thought testily.
The great doctor's old age was a lonely and a sordid one. He was
close on eighty now, but still to this day he received his patients
from ten to one, and closed his shrivelled hand with a clutch on
their guineas. For whom, nobody knew. Lady Merrick was long dead.
His daughters were well married, and he had quarrelled with their
husbands. Of his two younger sons, one had gone into the Fusiliers
and been speared at Suakim; the other had broken his neck on a
hunting-field in Warwickshire. The old man lived alone, and hugged
his money-bags. They were the one thing left for which he seemed
to retain any human affection.
So, when he read Dolly's card, being by nature suspicious, he felt
sure the child had called to see what she could get out of him.
But when he descended to the consulting-room with stern set face,
and saw a beautiful girl of seventeen awaiting him,—a tall
sunny-haired girl, with Alan's own smile and Alan's own eyes,—he
grew suddenly aware of an unexpected interest. The sun went back on
the dial of his life for thirty years or thereabouts, and Alan
himself seemed to stand before him. Alan, as he used to burst in for
his holidays from Winchester! After all, this pink rosebud was his
eldest son's only daughter.
Chestnut hair, pearly teeth, she was Alan all over.
Sir Anthony bowed his most respectful bow, with old-fashioned
courtesy.
"And what can I do for you, young lady?" he asked in his best
professional manner.
"Grandfather," the girl broke out, blushing red to the ears, but
saying it out none the less; "Grandfather, I'm your granddaughter,
Dolores Barton."
The old man bowed once more, a most deferential bow. Strange to
say, when he saw her, this claim of blood pleased him.
"So I see, my child," he answered. "And what do you want with me?"
"I only knew it last night," Dolly went on, casting down those blue
eyes in her shamefaced embarrassment. "And this morning . . . I've
come to implore your protection."
"That's prompt," the old man replied, with a curious smile, half
suspicious, half satisfied. "From whom, my little one?" And his
hand caressed her shoulder.
"From my mother," Dolly answered, blushing still deeper crimson.
"From the mother who put this injustice upon me. From the mother
who, by her own confession, might have given me an honorable
birthright, like any one else's, and who cruelly refused to."
The old man eyed her with a searching glance.
"Then she hasn't brought you up in her own wild ideas?" he said.
"She hasn't dinged them into you!"
"She has tried to," Dolly answered. "But I will have nothing to do
with them. I hate her ideas, and her friends, and her faction."
Sir Anthony drew her forward and gave her a sudden kiss. Her
spirit pleased him.
"That's well, my child," he answered. "That's well—for a
beginning."
Then Dolly, emboldened by his kindness,—for in a moment, somehow,
she had taken her grandfather's heart by assault,—began to tell
him how it had all come about; how she had received an offer from a
most excellent young man at Combe Mary in Dorsetshire,—very well
connected, the squire of his parish; how she had accepted him with
joy; how she loved him dearly; how this shadow intervened; how
thereupon, for the first time, she had asked for and learned the
horrid truth about her parentage; how she was stunned and appalled
by it; how she could never again live under one roof with such a
woman; and how she came to him for advice, for encouragement, for
assistance. She flung herself on his mercy. Every word she spoke
impressed Sir Anthony. This was no mere acting; the girl really
meant it. Brought up in those hateful surroundings, innate purity
of mind had preserved her innocent heart from the contagion of
example. She spoke like a sensible, modest, healthy English
maiden. She was indeed a granddaughter any man might be proud of.
'Twas clear as the sun in the London sky to Sir Anthony that she
recoiled with horror from her mother's position. He sympathized
with her and pitied her. Dolores, all blushes, lifted her eyelids
and looked at him. Her grandfather drew her towards him with a
smile of real tenderness, and, unbending as none had seen him
unbend before since Alan's death, told her all the sad history as
he himself envisaged it. Dolores listened and shuddered. The old
man was vanquished. He would have taken her once to himself, he
said, if Herminia had permitted it; he would take her to himself
now, if Dolores would come to him.
As for Dolly, she lay sobbing and crying in Sir Anthony's arms, as
though she had always known him. After all, he was her grandfather.
Nearer to her in heart and soul than her mother. And the butler
could hardly conceal his surprise and amazement when three minutes
later Sir Anthony rang the bell, and being discovered alone with a
strange young lady in tears, made the unprecedented announcement
that he would see no patients at all that morning, and was at home
to nobody.
But before Dolly left her new-found relation's house, it was all
arranged between them. She was to come there at once as his
adopted daughter; was to take and use the name of Merrick; was to
see nothing more of that wicked woman, her mother; and was to be
married in due time from Sir Anthony's house, and under Sir
Anthony's auspices, to Walter Brydges.
She wrote to Walter then and there, from her grandfather's
consulting-room. Numb with shame as she was, she nerved her hand
to write to him. In what most delicate language she could find,
she let him plainly know who Sir Anthony was, and all else that had
happened. But she added at the end one significant clause: "While
my mother lives, dear Walter, I feel I can never marry you."
End of Chapter XXII Chapter XXIII.
When she returned from Sir Anthony's to her mother's lodgings, she
found Herminia, very pale, in the sitting-room, waiting for her.
Her eyes were fixed on a cherished autotype of a Pinturicchia at
Perugia,—Alan's favorite picture. Out of her penury she had
bought it. It represented the Madonna bending in worship over her
divine child, and bore the inscription: "Quem genuit adoravit."
Herminia loved that group. To her it was no mere emblem of a dying
creed, but a type of the eternal religion of maternity. The Mother
adoring the Child! 'Twas herself and Dolly.
"Well?" Herminia said interrogatively, as her daughter entered, for
she half feared the worst.
"Well," Dolores answered in a defiant tone, blurting it out in
sudden jerks, the rebellion of a lifetime finding vent at last.
"I've been to my grandfather, my father's father; and I've told him
everything; and it's all arranged: and I'm to take his name; and
I'm to go and live with him."
"Dolly!" the mother cried, and fell forward on the table with her
face in her hands. "My child, my child, are you going to leave
me?"
"It's quite time," Dolly answered, in a sullen, stolid voice. "I
can't stop here, of course, now I'm almost grown up and engaged to
be married, associating any longer with such a woman as you have
been. No right-minded girl who respected herself could do it."
Herminia rose and faced her. Her white lips grew livid. She had
counted on every element of her martyrdom,—save one; and this, the
blackest and fiercest of all, had never even occurred to her.
"Dolly," she cried, "oh, my daughter, you don't know what you do!
You don't know how I've loved you! I've given up my life for you.
I thought when you came to woman's estate, and learned what was
right and what wrong, you would indeed rise up and call me blessed.
And now,—oh, Dolly, this last blow is too terrible. It will kill
me, my darling. I can't go on out-living it."
"You will," Dolly answered. "You're strong enough and wiry enough
to outlive anything. . . . But I wrote to Walter from Sir
Anthony's this morning, and told him I would wait for him if I
waited forever. For, of course, while YOU live, I couldn't think
of marrying him. I couldn't think of burdening an honest man with
such a mother-in-law as you are!"
Herminia could only utter the one word, "Dolly!" It was a
heart-broken cry, the last despairing cry of a wounded and stricken
creature.
End of Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV.
That night, Herminia Barton went up sadly to her own bed-room. It
was the very last night that Dolores was to sleep under the same
roof with her mother. On the morrow, she meant to remove to Sir
Anthony Merrick's.
As soon as Herminia had closed the door, she sat down to her
writing-table and began to write. Her pen moved of itself. And
this was her letter:—
"MY DARLING DAUGHTER,—By the time you read these words, I shall be
no longer in the way, to interfere with your perfect freedom of
action. I had but one task left in life—to make you happy. Now I
find I only stand in the way of that object, no reason remains why
I should endure any longer the misfortune of living.
"My child, my child, you must see, when you come to think it over
at leisure, that all I ever did was done, up to my lights, to serve
and bless you. I thought, by giving you the father and the birth I
did, I was giving you the best any mother on earth had ever yet
given her dearest daughter. I believe it still; but I see I should
never succeed in making YOU feel it. Accept this reparation. For
all the wrong I may have done, all the mistakes I may have made, I
sincerely and earnestly implore your forgiveness. I could not have
had it while I lived; I beseech and pray you to grant me dead what
you would never have been able to grant me living.
"My darling, I thought you would grow up to feel as I did; I
thought you would thank me for leading you to see such things as
the blind world is incapable of seeing. There I made a mistake;
and sorely am I punished for it. Don't visit it upon my head in
your recollections when I can no longer defend myself.
"I set out in life with the earnest determination to be a martyr to
the cause of truth and righteousness, as I myself understood them.
But I didn't foresee this last pang of martyrdom. No soul can
tell beforehand to what particular cross the blind chances of the
universe will finally nail it. But I am ready to be offered, and
the time of my departure is close at hand. I have fought a good
fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith I started
in life with. Nothing now remains for me but the crown of
martyrdom. My darling, it is indeed a very bitter cup to me that
you should wish me dead; but 'tis a small thing to die, above all
for the sake of those we love. I die for you gladly, knowing that
by doing so I can easily relieve my own dear little girl of one
trouble in life, and make her course lie henceforth through
smoother waters. Be happy! be happy! Good-by, my Dolly! Your
mother's love go forever through life with you!
"Burn this blurred note the moment you have read it. I inclose a
more formal one, giving reasons for my act on other grounds, to be
put in, if need be, at the coroner's inquest. Good-night, my
heart's darling. Your truly devoted and affectionate
MOTHER.
"Oh, Dolly, my Dolly, you never will know with what love I loved
you."
When she had finished that note, and folded it reverently with
kisses and tears, she wrote the second one in a firm hand for the
formal evidence. Then she put on a fresh white dress, as pure as her
own soul, like the one she had worn on the night of her self-made
bridal with Alan Merrick. In her *** she fastened two innocent
white roses from Walter Brydges's bouquet, arranging them with
studious care very daintily before her mirror. She was always a
woman. "Perhaps," she thought to herself, "for her lover's sake, my
Dolly will kiss them. When she finds them lying on her dead mother's
breast, my Dolly may kiss them." Then she cried a few minutes very
softly to herself; for no one can die without some little regret,
some consciousness of the unique solemnity of the occasion.
At last she rose and moved over to her desk. Out of it she took a
small glass-stoppered phial, that a scientific friend had given her
long ago for use in case of extreme emergency. It contained
prussic acid. She poured the contents into a glass and drank it
off. Then she lay upon her bed and waited for the only friend she
had left in the world, with hands folded on her breast, like some
saint of the middle ages.
Not for nothing does blind fate vouchsafe such martyrs to humanity.
From their graves shall spring glorious the church of the future.
When Dolores came in next morning to say good-by, she found her
mother's body cold and stiff upon the bed, in a pure white dress,
with two crushed white roses just peeping from her bodice.
Herminia Barton's stainless soul had ceased to exist forever.
End of Chapter XXIV And end of The Woman Who Did
by Grant Allen �