The very pictures in the gallery failed to interest Herminia, she
knew not why. Alan couldn't rouse her to enthusiasm over his
beloved Buonfigli. Those naive flaxen-haired angels, with sweetly
parted lips, and baskets of red roses in their delicate hands, own
sisters though they were to the girlish Lippis she had so admired
at Florence, moved her heart but faintly. Try as she might to like
them, she responded to nothing Perugian in any way.
At the end of a week or two, however, Alan began to complain of
constant headache. He was looking very well, but grew uneasy and
restless. Herminia advised him to give up sketching for a while,
those small streets were so close; and he promised to yield to her
wishes in the matter. Yet he grew worse next day, so that
Herminia, much alarmed, called in an Italian doctor. Perugia
boasted no English one. The Italian felt his pulse, and listened
to his symptoms. "The signore came here from Florence?" he asked.
"From Florence," Herminia assented, with a sudden sinking.
The doctor protruded his lower lip. "This is typhoid fever," he
said after a pause. "A very bad type. It has been assuming such a
form this winter at Florence."
He spoke the plain truth. Twenty-one days before in his bedroom at
the hotel in Florence, Alan had drunk a single glass of water from
the polluted springs that supply in part the Tuscan metropolis.
For twenty-one days those victorious microbes had brooded in
silence in his poisoned arteries. At the end of that time, they
swarmed and declared themselves. He was ill with an aggravated
form of the most deadly disease that still stalks unchecked through
unsanitated Europe.
Herminia's alarm was painful. Alan grew rapidly worse. In two
days he was so ill that she thought it her duty to telegraph at
once to Dr. Merrick, in London: "Alan's life in danger. Serious
attack of Florentine typhoid. Italian doctor despairs of his life.
May not last till to-morrow.--HERMINIA BARTON."
Later on in the day came a telegram in reply; it was addressed to
Alan: "Am on my way out by through train to attend you. But as a
matter of duty, marry the girl at once, and legitimatize your child
while the chance remains to you."
It was kindly meant in its way. It was a message of love, of
forgiveness, of generosity, such as Herminia would hardly have
expected from so stern a man as Alan had always represented his
father to be to her. But at moments of unexpected danger angry
feelings between father and son are often forgotten, and blood
unexpectedly proves itself thicker than water. Yet even so
Herminia couldn't bear to show the telegram to Alan. She feared
lest in this extremity, his mind weakened by disease, he might wish
to take his father's advice, and prove untrue to their common
principles. In that case, woman that she was, she hardly knew how
she could resist what might be only too probably his dying wishes.
Still, she nerved herself for this trial of faith, and went through
with it bravely. Alan, though sinking, was still conscious at
moments; in one such interval, with an effort to be calm, she
showed him his father's telegram. Tears rose into his eyes. "I
didn't expect him to come," he said. "This is all very good of
him." Then, after a moment, he added, "Would you wish me in this
extremity, Hermy, to do as he advises?"