Dr. Merrick took them up, and slank noiselessly from the room,
murmuring as he went some inarticulate words to the effect that he
had only desired to serve her. As soon as he was gone, Herminia's
nerve gave way. She flung herself into a chair, and sobbed long
and violently.
It was no time for her, of course, to think about money. Sore
pressed as she was, she had just enough left to see her safely
through her confinement. Alan had given her a few pounds for
housekeeping when they first got into the rooms, and those she
kept; they were hers; she had not the slightest impulse to restore
them to his family. All he left was hers too, by natural justice;
and she knew it. He had drawn up his will, attestation clause and
all, with even the very date inserted in pencil, the day before
they quitted London together; but finding no friends at the club to
witness it, he had put off executing it; and so had left Herminia
entirely to her own resources. In the delirium of his fever, the
subject never occurred to him. But no doubt existed as to the
nature of his last wishes; and if Herminia herself had been placed
in a similar position to that of the Merrick family, she would have
scorned to take so mean an advantage of the mere legal omission.
By this time, of course, the story of her fate had got across to
England, and was being read and retold by each man or woman after
his or her own fashion. The papers mentioned it, as seen through
the optic lens of the society journalist, with what strange
refraction. Most of them descried in poor Herminia's tragedy
nothing but material for a smile, a sneer, or an innuendo. The
Dean himself wrote to her, a piteous, paternal note, which bowed
her down more than ever in her abyss of sorrow. He wrote as a dean
must,--gray hairs brought down with sorrow to the grave; infinite
mercy of Heaven; still room for repentance; but oh, to keep away
from her pure young sisters! Herminia answered with dignity, but
with profound emotion. She knew her father too well not to
sympathize greatly with his natural view of so fatal an episode.
So she stopped on alone for her dark hour in Perugia. She stopped
on, untended by any save unknown Italians whose tongue she hardly
spoke, and uncheered by a friendly voice at the deepest moment of
trouble in a woman's history. Often for hours together she sat
alone in the cathedral, gazing up at a certain mild-featured
Madonna, enshrined above an altar. The unwedded widow seemed to
gain some comfort from the pitying face of the maiden mother.
Every day, while still she could, she walked out along the
shadeless suburban road to Alan's grave in the parched and crowded
cemetery. Women trudging along with crammed creels on their backs
turned round to stare at her. When she could no longer walk, she
sat at her window towards San Luca and gazed at it. There lay the
only friend she possessed in Perugia, perhaps in the universe.