Alan Merrick strode from his father's door that day stung with a
burning sense of wrong and injustice. More than ever before in
his life he realized to himself the abject hollowness of that
conventional code which masquerades in our midst as a system of
morals. If he had continued to "live single" as we hypocritically
phrase it, and so helped by one unit to spread the festering social
canker of prostitution, on which as basis, like some mediaeval
castle on its foul dungeon vaults, the entire superstructure of our
outwardly decent modern society is reared, his father no doubt
would have shrugged his shoulders and blinked his cold eyes, and
commended the wise young man for abstaining from marriage till his
means could permit him to keep a wife of his own class in the way
she was accustomed to. The wretched victims of that vile system
might die unseen and unpitied in some hideous back slum, without
touching one chord of remorse or regret in Dr. Merrick's nature.
He was steeled against their suffering. Or again, if Alan had sold
his virility for gold to some rich heiress of his set, like Ethel
Waterton--had bartered his freedom to be her wedded paramour in a
loveless marriage, his father would not only have gladly
acquiesced, but would have congratulated his son on his luck and
his prudence. Yet, because Alan had chosen rather to form a
blameless union of pure affection with a woman who was in every way
his moral and mental superior, but in despite of the conventional
ban of society, Dr. Merrick had cast him off as an open reprobate.
And why? Simply because that union was unsanctioned by the
exponents of a law they despised, and unblessed by the priests of a
creed they rejected. Alan saw at once it is not the intrinsic
moral value of an act such people think about, but the light in
which it is regarded by a selfish society.
Unchastity, it has been well said, is union without love; and Alan
would have none of it.
He went back to Herminia more than ever convinced of that spotless
woman's moral superiority to every one else he had ever met with.
She sat, a lonely soul, enthroned amid the halo of her own perfect
purity. To Alan, she seemed like one of those early Italian
Madonnas, lost in a glory of light that surrounds and half hides
them. He reverenced her far too much to tell her all that had
happened. How could he wound those sweet ears with his father's
coarse epithets?
They took the club train that afternoon to Paris. There they slept
the night in a fusty hotel near the Gare du Nord, and went on in
the morning by the daylight express to Switzerland. At Lucerne and
Milan they broke the journey once more. Herminia had never yet
gone further afield from England than Paris; and this first glimpse
of a wider world was intensely interesting to her. Who can help
being pleased, indeed, with that wonderful St. Gothard--the crystal
green Reuss shattering itself in white spray into emerald pools by
the side of the railway; Wasen church perched high upon its
solitary hilltop; the Biaschina ravine, the cleft rocks of Faido,
the serpentine twists and turns of the ramping line as it mounts or
descends its spiral zigzags? Dewy Alpine pasture, tossed masses of
land-slip, white narcissus on the banks, snowy peaks in the
background--all alike were fresh visions of delight to Herminia;
and she drank it all in with the pure childish joy of a poetic
nature. It was the Switzerland of her dreams, reinforced and
complemented by unsuspected detail.