The next six months were the happiest time of her life, for
Herminia. All day long she worked hard with her classes; and often
in the evenings Alan Merrick dropped in for sweet converse and
companionship. Too free from any taint of sin or shame herself
ever to suspect that others could misinterpret her actions,
Herminia was hardly aware how the gossip of Bower Lane made free in
time with the name of the young lady who had taken a cottage in the
row, and whose relations with the tall gentleman that called so
much in the evenings were beginning to attract the attention of the
neighborhood. The poor slaves of washer-women and working men's
wives all around, with whom contented slavery to a drunken, husband
was the only "respectable" condition,--couldn't understand for the
life of them how the pretty young lady could make her name so
cheap; "and her that pretends to be so charitable and that, and
goes about in the parish like a district visitor!" Though to be
sure it had already struck the minds of Bower Lane that Herminia
never went "to church nor chapel;" and when people cut themselves
adrift from church and chapel, why, what sort of morality can you
reasonably expect of them? Nevertheless, Herminia's manners were
so sweet and engaging, to rich and poor alike, that Bower Lane
seriously regretted what it took to be her lapse from grace. Poor
purblind Bower Lane! A life-time would have failed it to discern
for itself how infinitely higher than its slavish "respectability"
was Herminia's freedom. In which respect, indeed, Bower Lane was
no doubt on a dead level with Belgravia, or, for the matter of
that, with Lambeth Palace.
But Herminia, for her part, never discovered she was talked about.
To the pure all things are pure; and Herminia was dowered with that
perfect purity. And though Bower Lane lay but some few hundred
yards off from the Carlyle Place Girl's School, the social gulf
between them yet yawned so wide that good old Miss Smith-Waters
from Cambridge, the head-mistress of the school, never caught a
single echo of the washerwomen's gossip. Herminia's life through
those six months was one unclouded honeymoon. On Sundays, she and
Alan would go out of town together, and stroll across the breezy
summit of Leith Hill, or among the brown heather and garrulous
pine-woods that perfume the radiating spurs of Hind Head with their
aromatic resins. Her love for Alan was profound and absorbing;
while as for Alan, the more he gazed into the calm depths of that
crystal soul, the more deeply did he admire it. Gradually she was
raising him to her own level. It is impossible to mix with a lofty
nature and not acquire in time some tincture of its nobler and more
generous sentiments. Herminia was weaning Alan by degrees from the
world; she was teaching him to see that moral purity and moral
earnestness are worth more, after all, than to dwell with purple
hangings in all the tents of iniquity. She was making him
understand and sympathize with the motives which led her stoutly on
to her final martyrdom, which made her submit without a murmur of
discontent to her great renunciation.