"Yes, I've made up my mind," Herminia answered, with a faint tremor in her maidenly voice, but with hardly a trace now of a traitorous blush, where no blush was needed. "I've made up my mind, Alan; and from all we had said and talked over together, I thought you at least would sympathize in my resolve."
She spoke with a gentle tinge of regret, nay almost of disillusion. The bare suggestion of that regret stung Alan to the quick. He felt it was shame to him that he could not rise at once to the height of her splendid self-renunciation. "You mistake me, dearest," he answered, petting her hand in his own (and she allowed him to pet it). "It wasn't for myself, or for the world I hesitated. My thought was for you. You are very young yet. You say you have counted the cost. I wonder if you have. I wonder if you realize it."
"Only too well," Herminia replied, in a very earnest mood. "I have wrought it all out in my mind beforehand,covenanted with my soul that for women's sake I would be a free woman. Alan, whoever would be free must himself strike the blow. I know what you will say,what every man would say to the woman he loved under similar circumstances,'Why should YOU be the victim? Why should YOU be the martyr? Bask in the sun yourself; leave this doom to some other.' But, Alan, I can't. I feel I must face it. Unless one woman begins, there will be no beginning." She lifted his hand in her own, and fondled it in her turn with caressing tenderness. "Think how easy it would be for me, dear friend," she cried, with a catch in her voice, "to do as other women do; to accept the HONORABLE MARRIAGE you offer me, as other women would call it; to be false to my sex, a traitor to my convictions; to sell my kind for a mess of pottage, a name and a home, or even for thirty pieces of silver, to be some rich man's wife, as other women have sold it. But, Alan, I can't. My conscience won't let me. I know what marriage is, from what vile slavery it has sprung; on what unseen horrors for my sister women it is reared and buttressed; by what unholy sacrifices it is sustained, and made possible. I know it has a history, I know its past, I know its present, and I can't embrace it; I can't be untrue to my most sacred beliefs. I can't pander to the malignant thing, just because a man who loves me would be pleased by my giving way and would kiss me, and fondle me for it. And I love you to fondle me. But I must keep my proper place, the freedom which I have gained for myself by such arduous efforts. I have said to you already, 'So far as my will goes, I am yours; take me, and do as you choose with me.' That much I can yield, as every good woman should yield it, to the man she loves, to the man who loves her. But more than that, no. It would be treason to my sex; not my life, not my future, not my individuality, not my freedom."
"I wouldn't ask you for those," Alan answered, carried away by the torrent flood of her passionate speech. "I would wish you to guard them. But, Herminia, just as a matter of form,to prevent the world from saying the cruel things the world is sure to say,and as an act of justice to you, and your children! A mere ceremony of marriage; what more does it mean now-a-days than that we two agree to live together on the ordinary terms of civilized society?"
Still Herminia shook her head. "No, no," she cried vehemently. "I deny and decline those terms; they are part and parcel of a system of slavery. I have learnt that the righteous soul should avoid all appearance of evil. I will not palter and parley with the unholy thing. Even though you go to a registry-office and get rid as far as you can of every relic of the sacerdotal and sacramental idea, yet the marriage itself is still an assertion of man's supremacy over woman. It ties her to him for life, it ignores her individuality, it compels her to promise what no human heart can be sure of performing; for you can contract to do or not to do, easily enough, but contract to feel or not to feel,what transparent absurdity! It is full of all evils, and I decline to consider it. If I love a man at all, I must love him on terms of perfect freedom. I can't bind myself down to live with him to my shame one day longer than I love him; or to love him at all if I find him unworthy of my purest love, or unable to retain it; or if I discover some other more fit to be loved by me. You admitted the other day that all this was abstractly true; why should you wish this morning to draw back from following it out to its end in practice?"
Alan was only an Englishman, and shared, of course, the inability of his countrymen to carry any principle to its logical conclusion. He was all for admitting that though things must really be so, yet it were prudent in life to pretend they were otherwise. This is the well-known English virtue of moderation and compromise; it has made England what she is, the shabbiest, sordidest, worst-organized of nations. So he paused for a second and temporized. "It's for your sake, Herminia," he said again; "I can't bear to think of your making yourself a martyr. And I don't see how, if you act as you propose, you could escape martyrdom."
Herminia looked up at him with pleading eyes. Tears just trembled on the edge of those glistening lashes. "It never occurred to me to think," she said gently but bravely, "my life could ever end in anything else but martyrdom. It MUST needs be so with all true lives, and all good ones. For whoever sees the truth, whoever strives earnestly with all his soul to be good, must be raised many planes above the common mass of men around him; he must be a moral pioneer, and the moral pioneer is always a martyr. People won't allow others to be wiser and better than themselves, unpunished. They can forgive anything except moral superiority. We have each to choose between acquiescence in the wrong, with a life of ease, and struggle for the right, crowned at last by inevitable failure. To succeed is to fail, and failure is the only success worth aiming at. Every great and good life can but end in a Calvary."
"And I want to save you from that," Alan cried, leaning over her with real tenderness, for she was already very dear to him. "I want to save you from yourself; I want to make you think twice before you rush headlong into such a danger."
"NOT to save me from myself, but to save me from my own higher and better nature," Herminia answered with passionate seriousness. "Alan, I don't want any man to save me from that; I want you rather to help me, to strengthen me, to sympathize with me. I want you to love me, not for my face and form alone, not for what I share with every other woman, but for all that is holiest and deepest within me. If you can't love me for that, I don't ask you to love me; I want to be loved for what I am in myself, for the yearnings I possess that are most of all peculiar to me. I know you are attracted to me by those yearnings above everything; why wish me untrue to them? It was because I saw you could sympathize with me in these impulses that I said to myself, Here, at last, is the man who can go through life as an aid and a spur to me. Don't tell me I was mistaken; don't belie my belief. Be what I thought you were, what I know you are. Work with me, and help me. Lift me! raise me! exalt me! Take me on the sole terms on which I can give myself up to you."
She stretched her arms out, pleading; she turned those subtle eyes to him, appealingly. She was a beautiful woman. Alan Merrick was human. The man in him gave way; he seized her in his clasp, and pressed her close to his bosom. It heaved tumultuously. "I could do anything for you, Herminia," he cried, "and indeed, I do sympathize with you. But give me, at least, till to-morrow to think this thing over. It is a momentous question; don't let us be precipitate."
Herminia drew a long breath. His embrace thrilled through her. "As you will," she answered with a woman's meekness. "But remember, Alan, what I say I mean; on these terms it shall be, and upon none others. Brave women before me have tried for awhile to act on their own responsibility, for the good of their sex; but never of their own free will from the very beginning. They have avoided marriage, not because they thought it a shame and a surrender, a treason to their sex, a base yielding to the unjust pretensions of men, but because there existed at the time some obstacle in their way in the shape of the vested interest of some other woman. When Mary Godwin chose to mate herself with Shelley, she took her good name in her hands; but still there was Harriet. As soon as Harriet was dead, Mary showed she had no deep principle of action involved, by marrying Shelley. When George Eliot chose to pass her life with Lewes on terms of equal freedom, she defied the man-made law; but still, there was his wife to prevent the possibility of a legalized union. As soon as Lewes was dead, George Eliot showed she had no principle involved, by marrying another man. Now, I have the rare chance of acting otherwise; I can show the world from the very first that I act from principle, and from principle only. I can say to it in effect, 'See, here is the man of my choice, the man I love, truly, and purely, the man any one of you would willingly have seen offering himself in lawful marriage to your own daughters. If I would, I might go the beaten way you prescribe, and marry him legally. But of my own free will I disdain that degradation; I choose rather to be free. No fear of your scorn, no dread of your bigotry, no shrinking at your cruelty, shall prevent me from following the thorny path I know to be the right one. I seek no temporal end. I will not prove false to the future of my kind in order to protect myself from your hateful indignities. I know on what vile foundations your temple of wedlock is based and built, what pitiable victims languish and die in its sickening vaults; and I will not consent to enter it. Here, of my own free will, I take my stand for the right, and refuse your sanctions! No woman that I know of has ever yet done that. Other women have fallen, as men choose to put it in their odious dialect; no other has voluntarily risen as I propose to do.'" She paused a moment for breath. "Now you know how I feel," she continued, looking straight into his eyes. "Say no more at present; it is wisest so. But go home and think it out, and talk it over with me tomorrow."