Next afternoon, about two o’clock,
Alan called with a tremulous heart at the cottage.
Herminia had heard not a little of him meanwhile
from her friend Mrs. Dewsbury. “He’s
a charming young man, my dear,” the woman of
the world observed with confidence. “I
felt quite sure you’d attract one another.
He’s so clever and advanced, and everything
that’s dreadful, just like yourself,
Herminia. But then he’s also very well
connected. That’s always something, especially
when one’s an oddity. You wouldn’t
go down one bit yourself, dear, if you weren’t
a dean’s daughter. The shadow of a cathedral
steeple covers a multitude of sins. Mr. Merrick’s
the son of the famous London gout doctor, you
must know his name, all the royal
dukes flock to him. He’s a barrister himself,
and in excellent practice. You might do worse,
do you know, than to go in for Alan Merrick.”
Herminia’s lip curled an almost
imperceptible curl as she answered gravely, “I
don’t think you quite understand my plans in
life, Mrs. Dewsbury. It isn’t my present
intention to go in for anybody.”
But Mrs. Dewsbury shook her head.
She knew the world she lived in. “Ah,
I’ve heard a great many girls talk like that
beforehand,” she answered at once with her society
glibness; “but when the right man turned up,
they soon forgot their protestations. It makes
a lot of difference, dear, when a man really asks
you!”
Herminia bent her head. “You
misunderstand me,” she replied. “I
don’t mean to say I will never fall in love.
I expect to do that. I look forward to it frankly, it
is a woman’s place in life. I only mean
to say, I don’t think anything will ever induce
me to marry, that is to say, legally.”
Mrs. Dewsbury gave a start of surprise
and horror. She really didn’t know what
girls were coming to nowadays, which, considering
her first principles, was certainly natural.
But if only she had seen the conscious flush with
which Herminia received her visitor that afternoon,
she would have been confirmed in her belief that Herminia,
after all, in spite of her learning, was much like
other girls. In which conclusion Mrs. Dewsbury
would not in the end have been fully justified.
When Alan arrived, Herminia sat at
the window by the quaintly clipped box-tree, a volume
of verse held half closed in her hand, though she
was a great deal too honest and transparent to pretend
she was reading it. She expected Alan to call,
in accordance with his promise, for she had seen at
Mrs. Dewsbury’s how great an impression she
produced upon him; and, having taught herself that
it was every true woman’s duty to avoid the affectations
and self-deceptions which the rule of man has begotten
in women, she didn’t try to conceal from herself
the fact that she on her side was by no means without
interest in the question how soon he would pay her
his promised visit. As he appeared at the rustic
gate in the privet hedge, Herminia looked out, and
changed color with pleasure when she saw him push
it open.
“Oh, how nice of you to look
me up so soon!” she cried, jumping from her
seat (with just a glance at the glass) and strolling
out bareheaded into the cottage garden. “Isn’t
this a charming place? Only look at our hollyhocks!
Consider what an oasis after six months of London!”
She seemed even prettier than last
night, in her simple white morning dress, a mere ordinary
English gown, without affectation of any sort, yet
touched with some faint reminiscence of a flowing
Greek chiton. Its half-classical drapery exactly
suited the severe regularity of her pensive features
and her graceful figure. Alan thought as he
looked at her he had never before seen anybody who
appeared at all points so nearly to approach his ideal
of womanhood. She was at once so high in type,
so serene, so tranquil, and yet so purely womanly.
“Yes, it is a lovely place,”
he answered, looking around at the clematis that
drooped from the gable-ends. “I’m
staying myself with the Watertons at the Park, but
I’d rather have this pretty little rose-bowered
garden than all their balustrades and Italian terraces.
The cottagers have chosen the better part. What
gillyflowers and what columbines! And here you
look out so directly on the common. I love the
gorse and the bracken, I love the stagnant pond, I
love the very geese that tug hard at the silverweed,
they make it all seem so deliciously English.”
“Shall we walk to the ridge?”
Herminia asked with a sudden burst of suggestion.
“It’s too rare a day to waste a minute
of it indoors. I was waiting till you came.
We can talk all the freer for the fresh air on the
hill-top.”
Nothing could have suited Alan Merrick
better, and he said so at once. Herminia disappeared
for a moment to get her hat. Alan observed almost
without observing it that she was gone but for a second.
She asked none of that long interval that most women
require for the simplest matter of toilet. She
was back again almost instantly, bright and fresh
and smiling, in the most modest of hats, set so artlessly
on her head that it became her better than all art
could have made it. Then they started for a long
stroll across the breezy common, yellow in places with
upright spikes of small summer furze, and pink with
wild pea-blossom. Bees buzzed, broom crackled,
the chirp of the field cricket rang shrill from the
sand-banks. Herminia’s light foot tripped
over the spongy turf. By the top of the furthest
ridge, looking down on North Holmwood church, they
sat side by side for a while on the close short grass,
brocaded with daisies, and gazed across at the cropped
sward of Denbies and the long line of the North Downs
stretching away towards Reigate. Tender grays
and greens melted into one another on the larches
hard by; Betchworth chalk-pit gleamed dreamy white
in the middle distance. They had been talking
earnestly all the way, like two old friends together;
for they were both of them young, and they felt at
once that nameless bond which often draws one closer
to a new acquaintance at first sight than years of
converse. “How seriously you look at life,”
Alan cried at last, in answer to one of Herminias
graver thoughts. “I wonder what makes
you take it so much more earnestly than all other women?”
“It came to me all at once when
I was about sixteen,” Herminia answered with
quiet composure, like one who remarks upon some objective
fact of external nature. “It came to me
in listening to a sermon of my father’s, which
I always look upon as one more instance of the force
of heredity. He was preaching on the text, ‘The
Truth shall make you Free,’ and all that he said
about it seemed to me strangely alive, to be heard
from a pulpit. He said we ought to seek the
Truth before all things, and never to rest till we
felt sure we had found it. We should not suffer
our souls to be beguiled into believing a falsehood
merely because we wouldn’t take the trouble
to find out the Truth for ourselves by searching.
We must dig for it; we must grope after it.
And as he spoke, I made up my mind, in a flash of
resolution, to find out the Truth for myself about
everything, and never to be deterred from seeking
it, and embracing it, and ensuing it when found, by
any convention or preconception. Then he went
on to say how the Truth would make us Free, and I
felt he was right. It would open our eyes, and
emancipate us from social and moral slaveries.
So I made up my mind, at the same time, that whenever
I found the Truth I would not scruple to follow it
to its logical conclusions, but would practise it
in my life, and let it make me Free with perfect freedom.
Then, in search of Truth, I got my father to send
me to Girton; and when I had lighted on it there half
by accident, and it had made me Free indeed, I went
away from Girton again, because I saw if I stopped
there I could never achieve and guard my freedom.
From that day forth I have aimed at nothing but to
know the Truth, and to act upon it freely; for, as
Tennyson says,
’To live by law
Acting the law we live by without fear,
And because right is right to follow right,
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.’”
She broke off suddenly, and looking
up, let her eye rest for a second on the dark thread
of clambering pines that crest the down just above
Brockham. “This is dreadfully egotistical,”
she cried, with a sharp little start. “I
ought to apologize for talking so much to you about
my own feelings.”
Alan gazed at her and smiled.
“Why apologize,” he asked, “for
managing to be interesting? You, are not egotistical
at all. What you are telling me is history, the
history of a soul, which is always the one thing on
earth worth hearing. I take it as a compliment
that you should hold me worthy to hear it. It
is a proof of confidence. Besides,” he
went on, after a second’s pause, “I am
a man; you are a woman. Under those circumstances,
what would otherwise be egotism becomes common and
mutual. When two people sympathize with one
another, all they can say about themselves loses its
personal tinge and merges into pure human and abstract
interest.”
Herminia brought back her eyes from
infinity to his face. “That’s true,”
she said frankly. “The magic link of sex
that severs and unites us makes all the difference.
And, indeed, I confess I wouldn’t so have spoken
of my inmost feelings to another woman.”