And yet, once more, when he respected her so much for the sacrifice
she was willing to make for humanity, would it be right for him to
stand in her way, to deter her from realizing her own highest
nature? She was Herminia just because she lived in that world of
high hopes, just because she had the courage and the nobility to
dare this great thing. Would it be right of him to bring her down
from that pedestal whereon she stood so austere, and urge upon her
that she should debase herself to be as any other woman,--even as
Ethel Waterton? For the Watertons had brought him there to propose
to Ethel.
For hours he tossed and turned and revolved these problems. Rain
beat on the leaded panes of the Waterton dormers. Day dawned, but
no light came with it to his troubled spirit. The more he thought
of this dilemma, the more profoundly he shrank from the idea of
allowing himself to be made into the instrument for what the world
would call, after its kind, Herminia's shame and degradation. For
even if the world could be made to admit that Herminia had done
what she did from chaste and noble motives,--which considering what
we all know of the world, was improbable,--yet at any rate it could
never allow that he himself had acted from any but the vilest and
most unworthy reasons. Base souls would see in the sacrifice he
made to Herminia's ideals, only the common story of a trustful
woman cruelly betrayed by the man who pretended to love her, and
would proceed to treat him with the coldness and contempt with
which such a man deserves to be treated.
As the morning wore on, this view of the matter obtruded itself
more and more forcibly every moment on Alan. Over and over again
he said to himself, let come what come might, he must never aid and
abet that innocent soul in rushing blindfold over a cliff to her
own destruction. It is so easy at twenty-two to ruin yourself for
life; so difficult at thirty to climb slowly back again. No, no,
holy as Herminia's impulses were, he must save her from herself; he
must save her from her own purity; he must refuse to be led astray
by her romantic aspirations. He must keep her to the beaten path
trod by all petty souls, and preserve her from the painful crown of
martyrdom she herself designed as her eternal diadem.
Full of these manful resolutions, he rose up early in the morning.
He would be his Herminia's guardian angel. He would use her love
for him,--for he knew she loved him,--as a lever to egg her aside
from these slippery moral precipices.