by Grant Allen
But Dolly drew back in alarm. Not on such terms as those. She, too, had her pride; she, too, had her chivalry. “No, no,” she cried, shrinking. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it means. But till I’ve gone home to London and asked about it from mother, — oh, Walter, we two are no longer engaged. You are free from your promise.”
She said it proudly; she said it bravely. She said it with womanly grace and dignity. Something of Herminia shone out in her that moment. No man should ever take her — to the grandest home — unless he took her at her full worth, pleased and proud to win her.
Walter soothed and coaxed; but Dolores stood firm. Like a rock in the sea, no assault could move her. As things stood at present, she cried, they were no longer engaged. After she had seen her mother and talked it all over, she would write to him once more, and tell him what she thought of it.
And, crimson to the finger-tips with shame and modesty, she rushed from his presence up to her own dark bed-room.
XXI.
Next morning early, Dolly left Combe Neville on her way to London. When she reached the station, Walter was on the platform with a bunch of white roses. He handed them to her deferentially as she took her seat in the third-class carriage; and so sobered was Dolly by this great misfortune that she forgot even to feel a passing pang of shame that Walter should see her travel in that humble fashion. “Remember,” he whispered in her ear, as the train steamed out, “we are still engaged; I hold you to your promise.”
And Dolly, blushing maidenly shame and distress, shook her head decisively. “Not now,” she answered. “I must wait till I know the truth. It has always been kept from me. And now I WILL know it.”
She had not slept that night. All the way up to London, she kept turning her doubt over. The more she thought of it, the deeper it galled her. Her wrath waxed bitter against Herminia for this evil turn she had wrought. The smouldering anger of years blazed forth at last. Had she blighted her daughter’s life, and spoiled so fair a future by obstinate adherence to those preposterous ideas of hers?
Never in her life had Dolly loved her mother. At best, she had felt towards her that contemptuous toleration which inferior minds often extend to higher ones. And now — why, she hated her.
In London, as it happened, that very morning, Herminia, walking across Regent’s Park, had fallen in with Harvey Kynaston, and their talk had turned upon this self-same problem.
“What will you do when she asks you about it, as she must, sooner or later?” the man inquired.
And Herminia, smiling that serene sweet smile of hers, made answer at once without a second’s hesitation, “I shall confess the whole truth to her.”
“But it might be so bad for her,” Harvey Kynaston went on. And then he proceeded to bring up in detail casuistic objections on the score of a young girl’s modesty; all of which fell flat on Herminia’s more honest and consistent temperament.
“I believe in the truth,” she said simply; “and I’m never afraid of it. I don’t think a lie, or even a suppression, can ever be good in the end for any one. The Truth shall make you Free. That one principle in life can guide one through everything.”
In the evening, when Dolly came home, her mother ran out proudly and affectionately to kiss her. But Dolly drew back her face with a gesture of displeasure, nay, almost of shrinking. “Not now, mother!” she cried. “I have something to ask you about. Till I know the truth, I can never kiss you.”
Herminia’s face turned deadly white; she knew it had come at last. But still she never flinched. “You shall hear the truth from me, darling,” she said, with a gentle touch. “You have always heard it.”
They passed under the doorway and up the stairs in silence. As soon as they were in the sitting-room, Dolly fronted Herminia fiercely. “Mother,” she cried, with the air of a wild creature at bay, “were you married to my father?”
Herminia’s cheek blanched, and her pale lips quivered as she nerved herself to answer; but she answered bravely, “No, darling, I was not. It has always been contrary to my principles to marry.”
“YOUR principles!” Dolores echoed in a tone of ineffable, scorn. “YOUR principles! Your PRINCIPLES! All my life has been sacrificed to you and your principles!” Then she turned on her madly once more. “And WHO was my father?” she burst out in her agony.
Herminia never paused. She must tell her the truth. “Your father’s name was Alan Merrick,” she answered, steadying herself with one hand on the table. “He died at Perugia before you were born there. He was a son of Sir Anthony Merrick, the great doctor in Harley Street.”
The worst was out. Dolly stood still and gasped. Hot horror flooded her burning cheeks. Illegitimate! illegitimate! Dishonored from her birth! A mark for every cruel tongue to aim at! Born in shame and disgrace! And then, to think what she might have been, but for her mother’s madness! The granddaughter of two such great men in their way as the Dean of Dunwich and Sir Anthony Merrick.
She drew back, all aghast. Shame and agony held her. Something of maiden modesty burned bright in her cheek and down her very neck. Red waves coursed through her. How on earth after this could she face Walter Brydges?
“Mother, mother!” she broke out, sobbing, after a moment’s pause, “oh, what have you done? What have you done? A cruel, cruel mother you have been to me. How can I ever forgive you?”
Herminia gazed at her appalled. It was a natural tragedy. There was no way out of it. She couldn’t help seizing the thing at once, in a lightning flash of sympathy, from Dolly’s point of view, too. Quick womanly instinct made her heart bleed for her daughter’s manifest shame and horror.
“Dolly, Dolly,” the agonized mother cried, flinging herself upon her child’s mercy, as it were; “Don’t be hard on me; don’t be hard on me! My darling, how could I ever guess you would look at it like this? How could I ever guess my daughter and his would see things for herself in so different a light from the light we saw them in?”
“You had no right to bring me into the world at all,” Dolly cried, growing fiercer as her mother grew more unhappy. “If you did, you should have put me on an equality with other people.”
“Dolly,” Herminia moaned, wringing her hands in her despair, “my child, my darling, how I have loved you! how I have watched over you! Your life has been for years the one thing I had to live for. I dreamed you would be just such another one as myself. EQUAL with other people! Why, I thought I was giving you the noblest heritage living woman ever yet gave the child of her bosom. I thought you would be proud of it, as I myself would have been proud. I thought you would accept it as a glorious birthright, a supreme privilege. How could I foresee you would turn aside from your mother’s creed? How could I anticipate you would be ashamed of being the first free-born woman ever begotten in England? ’Twas a blessing I meant to give you, and you have made a curse of it.”
“YOU have made a curse of it!” Dolores answered, rising and glaring at her. “You have blighted my life for me. A good man and true was going to make me his wife. After this, how can I dare to palm myself off upon him?”
She swept from the room. Though broken with sorrow, her step was resolute. Herminia followed her to her bed-room. There Dolly sat long on the edge of the bed, crying silently, silently, and rocking herself up and down like one mad with agony. At last, in one fierce burst, she relieved her burdened soul by pouring out to her mother the whole tale of her meeting with Walter Brydges. Though she hated her, she must tell her. Herminia listened with deep shame. It brought the color back into her own pale cheek to think any man should deem he was performing an act of chivalrous self-devotion in marrying Herminia Barton’s unlawful daughter. Alan Merrick’s child! The child of so many hopes! The baby that was born to regenerate humanity!
At last, in a dogged way, Dolly rose once more. She put on her hat and jacket.
“Where are you going?” her mother asked, terrified.
“I am going out,” Dolores answered, “to the post, to telegraph t
o him.”
She worded her telegram briefly but proudly:
“My mother has told me all. I understand your feeling. Our arrangement is annulled. Good-by. You have been kind to me.”
An hour or two later, a return telegram came: —
“Our engagement remains exactly as it was. Nothing is changed. I hold you to your promise. All tenderest messages. Letter follows.”
That answer calmed Dolly’s mind a little. She began to think after all, — if Walter still wanted her, — she loved him very much; she could hardly dismiss him.
When she rose to go to bed, Herminia, very wistful, held out her white face to be kissed as usual. She held it out tentatively. Worlds trembled in the balance; but Dolly drew herself back with a look of offended dignity. “Never!” she answered in a firm voice. “Never again while I live. You are not fit to receive a pure girl’s kisses.”
And two women lay awake all that ensuing night sobbing low on their pillows in the Marylebone lodging-house.
XXII.
It was half-past nine o’clock next morning when the man-servant at Sir Anthony Merrick’s in Harley Street brought up to his master’s room a plain hand-written card on which he read the name, “Dolores Barton.”
“Does the girl want to blackmail me?” Sir Anthony thought testily.
The great doctor’s old age was a lonely and a sordid one. He was close on eighty now, but still to this day he received his patients from ten to one, and closed his shrivelled hand with a clutch on their guineas. For whom, nobody knew. Lady Merrick was long dead. His daughters were well married, and he had quarrelled with their husbands. Of his two younger sons, one had gone into the Fusiliers and been speared at Suakim; the other had broken his neck on a hunting-field in Warwickshire. The old man lived alone, and hugged his money-bags. They were the one thing left for which he seemed to retain any human affection.
So, when he read Dolly’s card, being by nature suspicious, he felt sure the child had called to see what she could get out of him.
But when he descended to the consulting-room with stern set face, and saw a beautiful girl of seventeen awaiting him, — a tall sunny-haired girl, with Alan’s own smile and Alan’s own eyes, — he grew suddenly aware of an unexpected interest. The sun went back on the dial of his life for thirty years or thereabouts, and Alan himself seemed to stand before him. Alan, as he used to burst in for his holidays from Winchester! After all, this pink rosebud was his eldest son’s only daughter.
Chestnut hair, pearly teeth, she was Alan all over.
Sir Anthony bowed his most respectful bow, with old-fashioned courtesy.
“And what can I do for you, young lady?” he asked in his best professional manner.
“Grandfather,” the girl broke out, blushing red to the ears, but saying it out none the less; “Grandfather, I’m your granddaughter, Dolores Barton.”
The old man bowed once more, a most deferential bow. Strange to say, when he saw her, this claim of blood pleased him.
“So I see, my child,” he answered. “And what do you want with me?”
“I only knew it last night,” Dolly went on, casting down those blue eyes in her shamefaced embarrassment. “And this morning . . . I’ve come to implore your protection.”
“That’s prompt,” the old man replied, with a curious smile, half suspicious, half satisfied. “From whom, my little one?” And his hand caressed her shoulder.
“From my mother,” Dolly answered, blushing still deeper crimson. “From the mother who put this injustice upon me. From the mother who, by her own confession, might have given me an honorable birthright, like any one else’s, and who cruelly refused to.”
The old man eyed her with a searching glance.
“Then she hasn’t brought you up in her own wild ideas?” he said. “She hasn’t dinged them into you!”
“She has tried to,” Dolly answered. “But I will have nothing to do with them. I hate her ideas, and her friends, and her faction.”
Sir Anthony drew her forward and gave her a sudden kiss. Her spirit pleased him.
“That’s well, my child,” he answered. “That’s well — for a beginning.”
Then Dolly, emboldened by his kindness, — for in a moment, somehow, she had taken her grandfather’s heart by assault, — began to tell him how it had all come about; how she had received an offer from a most excellent young man at Combe Mary in Dorsetshire, — very well connected, the squire of his parish; how she had accepted him with joy; how she loved him dearly; how this shadow intervened; how thereupon, for the first time, she had asked for and learned the horrid truth about her parentage; how she was stunned and appalled by it; how she could never again live under one roof with such a woman; and how she came to him for advice, for encouragement, for assistance. She flung herself on his mercy. Every word she spoke impressed Sir Anthony. This was no mere acting; the girl really meant it. Brought up in those hateful surroundings, innate purity of mind had preserved her innocent heart from the contagion of example. She spoke like a sensible, modest, healthy English maiden. She was indeed a granddaughter any man might be proud of. ’Twas clear as the sun in the London sky to Sir Anthony that she recoiled with horror from her mother’s position. He sympathized with her and pitied her. Dolores, all blushes, lifted her eyelids and looked at him. Her grandfather drew her towards him with a smile of real tenderness, and, unbending as none had seen him unbend before since Alan’s death, told her all the sad history as he himself envisaged it. Dolores listened and shuddered. The old man was vanquished. He would have taken her once to himself, he said, if Herminia had permitted it; he would take her to himself now, if Dolores would come to him.
As for Dolly, she lay sobbing and crying in Sir Anthony’s arms, as though she had always known him. After all, he was her grandfather. Nearer to her in heart and soul than her mother. And the butler could hardly conceal his surprise and amazement when three minutes later Sir Anthony rang the bell, and being discovered alone with a strange young lady in tears, made the unprecedented announcement that he would see no patients at all that morning, and was at home to nobody.
But before Dolly left her new-found relation’s house, it was all arranged between them. She was to come there at once as his adopted daughter; was to take and use the name of Merrick; was to see nothing more of that wicked woman, her mother; and was to be married in due time from Sir Anthony’s house, and under Sir Anthony’s auspices, to Walter Brydges.
She wrote to Walter then and there, from her grandfather’s consulting-room. Numb with shame as she was, she nerved her hand to write to him. In what most delicate language she could find, she let him plainly know who Sir Anthony was, and all else that had happened. But she added at the end one significant clause: “While my mother lives, dear Walter, I feel I can never marry you.”
XXIII.
When she returned from Sir Anthony’s to her mother’s lodgings, she found Herminia, very pale, in the sitting-room, waiting for her. Her eyes were fixed on a cherished autotype of a Pinturicchia at Perugia, — Alan’s favorite picture. Out of her penury she had bought it. It represented the Madonna bending in worship over her divine child, and bore the inscription: “Quem genuit adoravit.” Herminia loved that group. To her it was no mere emblem of a dying creed, but a type of the eternal religion of maternity. The Mother adoring the Child! ’Twas herself and Dolly.
“Well?” Herminia said interrogatively, as her daughter entered, for she half feared the worst.
“Well,” Dolores answered in a defiant tone, blurting it out in sudden jerks, the rebellion of a lifetime finding vent at last. “I’ve been to my grandfather, my father’s father; and I’ve told him everything; and it’s all arranged: and I’m to take his name; and I’m to go and live with him.”
“Dolly!” the mother cried, and fell forward on the table with her face in her hands. “My child, my child, are you going to leave me?”
“It’s quite time,” Dolly answered, in a sullen, stolid voice. “I can’t
stop here, of course, now I’m almost grown up and engaged to be married, associating any longer with such a woman as you have been. No right-minded girl who respected herself could do it.”
Herminia rose and faced her. Her white lips grew livid. She had counted on every element of her martyrdom, — save one; and this, the blackest and fiercest of all, had never even occurred to her. “Dolly,” she cried, “oh, my daughter, you don’t know what you do! You don’t know how I’ve loved you! I’ve given up my life for you. I thought when you came to woman’s estate, and learned what was right and what wrong, you would indeed rise up and call me blessed. And now, — oh, Dolly, this last blow is too terrible. It will kill me, my darling. I can’t go on out-living it.”
“You will,” Dolly answered. “You’re strong enough and wiry enough to outlive anything. . . . But I wrote to Walter from Sir Anthony’s this morning, and told him I would wait for him if I waited forever. For, of course, while YOU live, I couldn’t think of marrying him. I couldn’t think of burdening an honest man with such a mother-in-law as you are!”
Herminia could only utter the one word, “Dolly!” It was a heart-broken cry, the last despairing cry of a wounded and stricken creature.
XXIV.
That night, Herminia Barton went up sadly to her own bed-room. It was the very last night that Dolores was to sleep under the same roof with her mother. On the morrow, she meant to remove to Sir Anthony Merrick’s.