The Woman Who Did

Chapter 14

I do not propose to dwell at any length upon the next ten or twelve

years of Herminia Barton's life. An episode or two must suffice;

and those few told briefly.

She saw nothing of her family. Relations had long been strained

between them; now they were ruptured. To the rest of the Bartons,

she was even as one dead; the sister and daughter's name was never

pronounced among them. But once, when little Dolores was about

five years old, Herminia happened to pass a church door in

Marylebone, where a red-lettered placard announced in bold type

that the Very Reverend the Dean of Dunwich would preach there on

Sunday. It flashed across her mind that this was Sunday morning.

An overpowering desire to look on her father's face once more--she

had never seen her mother's--impelled Herminia to enter those

unwonted portals. The Dean was in the pulpit. He looked stately

and dignified in his long white hair, a noticeable man, tall and

erect to the last, like a storm-beaten pine; in spite of his

threescore years and ten, his clear-cut face shone thoughtful, and

striking, and earnest as ever. He was preaching from the text, "I

press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling." And he

preached, as he always did, eloquently. His river of speech flowed

high between banks out of sight of the multitude. There was such

perfect sincerity, such moral elevation in all he said, that

Herminia felt acutely, as she had often felt before, the close

likeness of fibre which united her to him, in spite of extreme

superficial differences of belief and action. She felt it so much

that when the sermon was over she waited at the vestry door for her

father to emerge. She couldn't let him go away without making at

least an effort to speak with him.

When the Dean came out, a gentle smile still playing upon his

intellectual face,--for he was one of the few parsons who manage in

their old age to look neither sordid nor inane,--he saw standing by

the vestry door a woman in a plain black dress, like a widow of the

people. She held by the hand a curly-haired little girl of

singularly calm and innocent expression. The woman's dark hair

waved gracefully on her high forehead, and caught his attention.

Her eyes were subtly sweet, her mouth full of pathos. She pressed

forward to speak to him; the Dean, all benignity, bent his head to

listen.

"Father!" Herminia cried, looking up at him.

The Dean started back. The woman who thus addressed him was barely

twenty-eight, she might well have been forty; grief and hard life

had made her old before her time. Her face was haggard. Beautiful

as she still was, it was the beauty of a broken heart, of a Mater

Dolorosa, not the roundfaced beauty of the fresh young girl who had

gone forth rejoicing some ten years earlier from the Deanery at

Dunwich to the lecture-rooms at Girton. For a moment the Dean

stared hard at her. Then with a burst of recognition he uttered

aghast the one word "Herminia!"

"Father," Herminia answered, in a tremulous voice, "I have fought a

good fight; I have pressed toward the mark for the prize of a high

calling. And when I heard you preach, I felt just this once, let

come what come might, I must step forth to tell you so."

The Dean gazed at her with melting eyes. Love and pity beamed

strong in them. "Have you come to repent, my child?" he asked,

with solemn insistence.

"Father," Herminia made answer, lingering lovingly on the word, "I

have nothing to repent of. I have striven hard to do well, and

have earned scant praise for it. But I come to ask to-day for one

grasp of your hand, one word of your blessing. Father, father,

kiss me!"

The old man drew himself up to his full height, with his silvery

hair round his face. Tears started to his eyes; his voice

faltered. But he repressed himself sternly. "No, no, my child,"

he answered. "My poor old heart bleeds for you. But not till you

come with full proofs of penitence in your hands can I ever receive

you. I have prayed for you without ceasing. God grant you may

repent. Till then, I command you, keep far away from me, and from

your untainted sisters."

The child felt her mother's hand tremble quivering in her own, as

she led her from the church; but never a word did Herminia say,

lest her heart should break with it. As soon as she was outside,

little Dolly looked up at her. (It had dwindled from Dolores to

Dolly in real life by this time; years bring these mitigations of

our first fierce outbursts.) "Who was that grand old gentleman?"

the child asked, in an awe-struck voice.

And Herminia, clasping her daughter to her breast, answered with a

stifled sob, "That was your grandpa, Dolly; that was my father, my

father."

The child put no more questions just then as is the wont of

children; but she treasured up the incident for long in her heart,

wondering much to herself why, if her grandpa was so grand an old

gentleman, she and her mamma should have to live by themselves in

such scrubby little lodgings. Also, why her grandpa, who looked so

kind, should refuse so severely to kiss her mammy.

It was the beginning of many doubts and questionings to Dolores.

A year later, the Dean died suddenly. People said he might have

risen to be a bishop in his time, if it hadn't been for that

unfortunate episode about his daughter and young Merrick. Herminia

was only once mentioned in his will; and even then merely to

implore the divine forgiveness for her. She wept over that sadly.

She didn't want the girls' money, she was better able to take care

of herself than Elsie and Ermyntrude; but it cut her to the quick

that her father should have quitted the world at last without one

word of reconciliation.

However, she went on working placidly at her hack-work, and living

for little Dolly. Her one wish now was to make Dolly press toward

the mark for the prize of the high calling she herself by mere

accident had missed so narrowly. Her own life was done; Alan's

death had made her task impossible; but if Dolly could fill her

place for the sake of humanity, she would not regret it. Enough

for her to have martyred herself; she asked no mercenary palm and

crown of martyrdom.

And she was happy in her life; as far as a certain tranquil sense

of duty done could make her, she was passively happy. Her kind of

journalism was so commonplace and so anonymous that she was spared

that worst insult of seeing her hack-work publicly criticised as

though it afforded some adequate reflection of the mind that

produced it, instead of being merely an index of taste in the minds

of those for whose use it was intended. So she lived for years, a

machine for the production of articles and reviews; and a devoted

mother to little developing Dolly.

On Dolly the hopes of half the world now centred.