She must shape her path now for herself without Alan’s aid, without Alan’s advice. And her bitterest enemies in life, she felt sure, would henceforth be those of Alan’s household.
Yet, lonely as she was, she determined from the first moment no course was left open for her save to remain at Perugia. She couldn’t go away so soon from the spot where Alan was laid—from all that remained to her now of Alan. Except his unborn baby—the baby that was half his, half hers—the baby predestined to regenerate humanity. Oh, how she longed to fondle it! Every arrangement had been made in Perugia for the baby’s advent; she would stand by those arrangements still, in her shuttered room, partly because she couldn’t tear herself away from Alan’s grave; partly because she had no heart left to make the necessary arrangements elsewhere; but partly also because she wished Alan’s baby to be born near Alan’s side, where she could present it after birth at its father’s last resting-place. It was a fanciful wish, she knew, based upon ideas she had long since discarded; but these ancestral sentiments echo long in our hearts; they die hard with us all, and most hard with women.
She would stop on at Perugia, and die in giving birth to Alan’s baby; or else live to be father and mother in one to it.
So she stopped and waited; waited in tremulous fear, half longing for death, half eager not to leave that sacred baby an orphan. It would be Alan’s baby, and might grow in time to be the world’s true saviour. For, now that Alan was dead, no hope on earth seemed too great to cherish for Alan’s child within her.
And oh, that it might be a girl, to take up the task she herself had failed in!
The day after the funeral, Dr Merrick called in for the last time at her lodgings. He brought in his hand a legal-looking paper, which he had found in searching among Alan’s effects, for he had carried them off to his hotel, leaving not even a memento of her ill-starred love to Herminia.
“This may interest you,” he said dryly. “You will see at once it is in my son’s handwriting.”
Herminia glanced over it with a burning face. It was a will in her favour, leaving absolutely everything of which he died possessed “to my beloved friend, Herminia Barton.”