Chapter 26

'Yes, yes; but let me see the picture first. I can bear anything now. Howsoever terrible it may be, I can bear it now; for she's found--she's safe.' And I rushed into the next room, and began turning round in a wild manner one after another some dozens of canvases that were standing on the floor and leaning against the wall.

Half the canvases had been turned, and then I came upon what I sought.

I stood petrified. But I heard Wilderspin's voice at my side say, 'Do not let an imaginary scene distress you, Mr. Aylwin. The picture merely represents the scene in Coleridge's poem where the Lady Christabel, having secretly and in pity brought to her room to share her bed the mysterious lady she had met in the forest at midnight, watches the beautiful witch undress, and is spell-bound and struck dumb by some "sight to dream of, not to tell," which she sees at the lady's bosom.'

* * * * *

Christabel! It was Winifred sitting there upright in bed, confronted by a female figure--a tall lady, who with bowed head was undressing herself beneath a lamp suspended from the ceiling. Christabel! It was Winifred gazing at this figure--gazing as though fascinated; her dark hair falling and tumbling down her neck, till it was at last partly lost between her shining bosom and her nightdress. Yes, and in her blue eyes there was the same concentration of light, there was the same uprolling of the lips, there was the same dreadful gleaming of the teeth, the same swollen veins about the throat that I had seen in Wales. No wonder that at first I could see only the face and figure of Winifred. My consciousness had again dwindled to a single point. In a few seconds, however, I perceived that the scene was an antique oak-panelled chamber, corniced with large and curiously-carven figures, upon which played the warm light from a silver lamp suspended from the middle of the ceiling by a twofold silver chain fastened to the feet of an angel, quaintly carved in the dark wood of the ceiling. It was beneath this lamp that stood the majestic figure of the beautiful stranger, the Lady Geraldine. As she bent her head to look at her bosom, which she was about fully to uncover, the lamp-light gleaming among the gems and flashing in her hair and down her loosened white silken robe to her naked feet, shining, blue-veined and half-hidden in the green rushes that covered the floor, she seemed to be herself the source from which the lurid light was shed about the room. But her eyes were brighter than all. They were more dreadful by far to look at than Winifred's own--they were rolling wildly as if in an agony of hate, while she was drawing in her breath till that marble throat of hers seemed choking. It was not upon her eyes, however, that Winifred's were fixed: it was upon the lady's bosom, for out from beneath the partially-loosened robes that covered that bosom a tiny fork of flame was flickering like a serpent's tongue ruddy from the fires of a cruel and monstrous hate within.

This sight was dreadful enough; but it was not the terror on Winifred's face that now sent me reeling against Sleaford, who with my mother had followed me into the smaller room. Whose figure was that, and whose was the face which at first I had half-recognised in the Lady Geraldine? My mother's!

In painting this subject Wilderspin had, without knowing it, worked with too strong a reminiscence of my mother's portrait, unconscious that he was but giving expression to the awful irony of Heaven.

I turned round. Wilderspin was supporting with difficulty my mother's dead weight. For the first time (as I think) in her life, she whom, until I came to know Sinfi Lovell, I had believed to be the strongest, proudest, bravest woman living, had fainted.

'Dear me!' said Wilderspin, 'I had no idea that Christabel's terror was so strongly rendered,--no idea! Art should never produce an effect like this. Romantic art knows nothing of a mere sensational illusion. Dear me!--I must soften it at once.'

He was evidently quite unconscious that he had given my mother's features to Geraldine, and attributed the effect to his own superlative strength as a dramatic artist.

I ran to her: she soon recovered, but asked to be taken to Belgrave Square at once. Wild as I was with the desire to go in quest of Winifred; goaded as I was by a new, nameless, shapeless dread which certain words of Wilderspin's had aroused, but which (like the dread that had come to me on the night of my father's funeral) was too appalling to confront, I was obliged to leave the studio and take my mother to the house of my aunt, who was, I knew, waiting to start for the yacht.

XI

THE IRONY OF HEAVEN

I

As we stepped into the carriage, Sleaford, full of sympathy, jumped in. This fortunately prevented a conversation that would have been intolerable both to my mother and to me.

'Studio oppressively close,' said Sleaford; 'usual beastly smell of turpentine and pigments and things. Why the dooce don't these fellows ventilate their studios before they get ladies to go to see their paintin's!' This he kept repeating, but got no response from either of us.

As to me, let me honestly confess that I had but one thought: how much time would be required to go to Belgrave Square and back to the studio, to learn the whereabouts of Winifred. 'But she's safe,' I kept murmuring, in answer to that rising dread: 'Wilderspin said she was safe.'

During that drive to Belgrave Square, he whose bearing towards my mother was that of the anxious, loving son was not I, the only living child of her womb, but poor, simple, empty-headed Sleaford.

When we reached Belgrave Square my mother declared that she had entirely recovered from the fainting fit, but I scarcely dared to look into those haggard eyes of hers, which showed only too plainly that the triumph of remorse in her bosom was now complete. My aunt, who seemed to guess that something lowering to the family had taken place, was impatient to get on board the yacht. I saw how my mother now longed to remain and learn the upshot of events; but I told her that she was far better away now, and that I would write to her and keep her posted up in the story day by day. I bade them a hurried 'Good-bye.'

'How shall I be able to stay out of England until I know all about her?' said my mother. 'Go back and learn all about her, Henry, and write to me; and be sure to get and take care of that dreadful picture, and write to me about that also.'

When the carriage left I walked rapidly along the Square, looking for a hansom. In a second or two Sleaford was by my side. He took my arm.

'I suppose you're goin' back to cane him, aren't you?' said he.

'Cane whom?' I said impatiently, for that intolerable thought which I have hinted at was now growing within my brain, and I must, _must_ be alone to grapple with it.

'Cane the d----d painter, of course,' said Sleaford, opening his great blue eyes in wonder that such a question should be asked. 'Awfully bad form that fellow goin' and puttin' your mother in the picture. But that's just the way with these fellows.'

'What do you mean?' I asked again.

'What do I mean? The paintin' and writin' fellows. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as I've often and often said to Cyril Aylwin; and by Jove, I'm right for once. I suppose I needn't ask you if you're going back to cane him.'

'Wilderspin did what he did quite unconsciously,' I replied, as I hailed a hansom. 'It was the finger of God.'

'The finger of--Oh come! That be hanged, old chap.'

'Good-bye,' I said, as I jumped into the hansom.

'But you don't mean to say you are goin' to let a man put your mother into--'

I heard no more. The terrible idea which had been growing in my brain, shaping itself out of a nebulous mass of reminiscences of what had just occurred at the studio, was now stinging me to madness. Wilderspin's extreme dejection, the strange way in which he had seemed inclined to evade answering my question as to the safety of Winifred, the look of pity on his face as at last he answered 'quite safe'--what did all these indications portend? At every second the thought grew and grew, till my brain seemed like a vapour of fire, and my eyeballs seemed to scorch their sockets as I cried aloud: 'Have I found her at last to lose her?'

On reaching the studio door I rapped: before the servant had time to answer my summons, I rapped again till the sounds echoed along the street. When my summons was answered, I rushed upstairs. Wilderspin stood at the studio door, listening, apparently, to the sound of the blacksmith's anvil coming in from the back of Maud Street through the open window. Though his sorrowful face told all, I cried out, 'Wilderspin, she's safe? You said she was safe?'

'My friend,' said Wilderspin solemnly, 'the news I have to give you is news that I knew you would rather receive when you could hear it alone.'

'You said she was safe!'

'Yes, safe indeed! She whom you, under some strange but no doubt beneficent hallucination, believe to be the lady you lost in Wales, is safe indeed, for she is in the spirit-land with her whose blessing lent her to me--she has returned to her who was once a female blacksmith at Oldhill, and is now the brightest, sweetest, purest saint in Paradise.'

Dead! My soul had been waiting for the word--expecting it ever since I left the studio with my mother--but now it sounded more dreadful than if it had come as a surprise.

'Tell me all,' I cried, 'at once--at once. She did not return, you say, on the day following the catastrophe--when did she return?--when did you next see her?'

'I never saw her again alive,' answered Wilderspin mournfully; 'but you are so pale, Mr. Aylwin, and your eyes are so wild, I had better defer telling you what little more there is to tell until you have quite recovered from the shock.'

'No; now, now.'

Wilderspin looked with a deep sigh at the picture of 'Faith and Love,' fired by the lights of sunset, where Winnie's face seemed alive.

'Well,' said he, 'as she did not come, I worked at my painting of "Ruth" all day; and on the next morning, as I was starting for Primrose Court to seek her, Mrs. Gudgeon came kicking frantically at the street-door. When it was opened, she came stamping upstairs, and as I advanced to meet her, she shook her fists in my face, shouting out: "I could tear your eyes out, you vagabones." "Why, what is the matter?" I asked in great surprise. "You've bin and killed her, that's all," said the woman, foaming at the mouth. She then told me that her daughter, almost immediately on reaching home after having left the studio in the company of my servant, had fallen down in a swoon. A succession of swoons followed. She never rallied. She was then lying dead in Primrose Court.'

'And what then? Answer me quickly.'

'She asked me to give her money that her daughter might be buried respectably and not by the parish. I told her it was all hallucination about the girl being her daughter, and that a spiritual body could not be buried, but she seemed so genuinely distressed that I gave her the money.'

'Spiritual body! Hallucination!' I said. 'I heard her voice in the London streets, and she was seen selling baskets at the theatre door. Where shall I find the house?'

'It is of no use for you to go there,' he said.

'Nothing shall prevent my going at once.' A feverish yearning had come upon me to see the body.

'If you _will_ go,' said Wilderspin, 'it is No. 2 Primrose Court, Great Queen Street, Holborn.

II

I hurried out of the house, and soon finding a cab I drove to Great Queen Street.

My soul had passed now into another torture-chamber. It was being torn between two warring, maddening forces--the passionate desire to see her body, and the shrinking dread of undergoing the ordeal. At one moment I felt--as palpably as I felt it, on the betrothal night--her slim figure, soft as a twine of flowers in my arms: at the next I was clasping a corpse--a rigid corpse in rags. And yet I can scarcely say that I had any thoughts. At Great Queen Street I dismissed the cab, and had some little difficulty in finding Primrose Court, a miserable narrow alley. I knocked at a door which, even in that light, I could see was a peculiarly wretched one. After a considerable delay the door was opened and a face peered out--the face of the woman whom I had seen in Cyril's studio. She did not at first seem to recognise me. She was evidently far gone in liquor, and looked at me, murmuring, 'You're one o' the cussed body-snatchers; I know you: you belong to the Rose Alley "Forty Thieves." You'll swing--every man Jack o' ye'll swing yet, mind if you don't.'

At the sight of the squalid house in which Winifred had lived and died I passed into a new world of horror. Dead matter had become conscious, and for a second or two it was not the human being before me, but the rusty iron, the broken furniture, the great patches of brick and dirty mortar where the plaster had fallen from the walls,--it was these which seemed to have life--a terrible life--and to be talking to me, telling me what I dared not listen to about the triumph of evil over good. I knew that the woman was still speaking, but for a time I heard no sound--my senses could receive no impressions save from the sinister eloquence of the dead and yet living matter around me. Not an object there that did not seem charged with the wicked message of the heartless Fates.

At length, and as I stood upon the doorstep, a trembling, a mighty expectance, seized me like an ague-fit; and I heard myself saying, 'I am come to see the body, Mrs. Gudgeon.' Then I saw her peer, blinking, into my face, as she said,

'Oh, oh, it's _you_, is it? It's one o' the lot as keeps the studeros, is it?--the cussed Chelsea lot as killed her. I recklet yer a-starin' at the goddess Joker! So you've come to see my poor darter's body, are you? How werry kind, to be sure! Pray come in, gentleman, an' pray let the beautiful goddess Joker be perlite an' show sich a nice kind wisiter the way upstairs.'

She took a candle, and with a mincing, mocking movement, curtseying low at every step, she backed before me, and then stood waiting at the foot of the staircase with a drunken look of satire on her features.

'Pray go upstairs fust, gentleman,' said she; 'I can't think o' goin' up fust, an' lettin' my darter's kind wisiter foller behind like a sarvint. I 'opes we knows our manners better nor that comes to in Primrose Court.'

'None of this foolery now, woman,' said I. 'There's a time for everything, you know.'

'How right he is!' she exclaimed, nodding to the flickering candle in her hand. 'There's a time for everything an' this is the time for makin' a peep-show of my pore darter's body. Oh, yes!'

I mounted a shaky staircase, the steps of which were, some of them, so broken away that the ascent was no easy matter. The miserable light from the woman's candle, as I entered the room, seemed suddenly to shoot up in a column of dazzling brilliance that caused me to close my eyes in pain, so unnaturally sensitive had they been rendered by the terrible expectance of the sight that was about to sear them.

When I re-opened my eyes, I perceived that in the room there was one window, which looked like a trap-door; on the red pantiles of the opposite roof lay a smoke-dimmed sheet of moonlight. On the floor at the further end of the garret, where the roof met the boards at a sharp angle, a mattress was spread. Then speech came to me.

'Not there!' I groaned, pointing to the hideous black-looking bed, and turning my head away in terror. The woman burst into a cackling laugh.

'Not there? Who said she _was_ there? _I_ didn't. If you can see anythink there besides a bed an' a quilt, you've got eyes as can make picturs out o' nothink, same as my darter's eyes could make 'em, pore dear.'

'Ah, what do you mean?' I cried, leaping to the side of the mattress, upon which I now saw that no dead form was lying.

For a moment a flash of joy as dazzling as a fork of lightning seemed to strike through my soul and turn my blood into a liquid fire that rose and blinded my eyes.

'Not dead,' I cried; 'no, no, no! The pitiful heavens would have rained blood and tears at such a monstrous tragedy. She is not dead--not dead after all! The hideous dream is passing.'

'Oh, ain't she dead, pore dear?--ain't she? She's dead enough for one,' said the woman; 'but 'ow can she be there on that mattress, when she's buried, an' the prayers read over her, like the darter of the most 'spectable mother as ever lived in Primrose Court! That's what the neighbours say o' me. The most 'spectable mother as ever--'

'Buried!' I said, 'who buried her?'

'Who buried her? Why the parish, in course.'

Despair then again seemed to send a torrent of ice-water through my veins. But after a time the passionate desire to see her body leapt up within my heart.

At this moment Wilderspin, who had evidently followed me with remarkable expedition, came upstairs and stood by my side.

'I must go and see the grave,' I said to him. 'I must see her face once more. I must petition the Home Secretary. Nothing can and nothing shall prevent my seeing her--no, not if I have to dig down to her with my nails.'

'An' who the dickens are you as takes on so about my darter?' said the woman, holding the candle to my face.

'Drunken brute!' said I. 'Where is she buried?'

'Well, I'm sure!' said the woman in a mincing, sarcastic voice. 'How werry unperlite you is all at wonst! how werry rude you speaks to such a werry 'spectable party as I am! You seem to forgit who I am. Ain't I the goddess as likes to 'ave 'er little joke, an' likes to wet both eyes, and as plays sich larks with her flummeringeroes and drumming-dairies an' ring-tailed monkeys an' men?'

When I saw the creature whip up the quilt from the mattress, and, holding it over her head like a veil, leer hideously in imitation of Cyril's caricature, a shudder went again through my frame--a strange kind of dementia came upon me; my soul again seemed to leave my body--seemed to be lifted through the air and beyond the stars, crying, in agony, 'Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?' Yet all the while, though my soul seemed fleeing through infinite space, where a pitiless universe was waltzing madly round a ball of cruel fire--all the while I was acutely conscious of looking down upon the dreadful dream-world below, looking down into a frightful garret where a dialogue between two dream-figures was going on--a dialogue between Wilderspin and the woman, each word of which struck upon my ears like a sharp-edged flint, though it seemed millions of miles away.

* * * * *

'What made you trick me like this? Where is the money I gave you for the funeral?'

'That's werry true, about that money, an' where is it? The orkerdest question about money allus is--"Where is it?" The money for that funeral I 'ad, I won't deny that. The orkard question ain't that: it's "Where is it?" But you see, arter I left your studero I sets on that pore gal's bed a-cryin' fit to bust; then I goes out into Clement's Alley, and I calls on Mrs. Mix--that's a werry dear friend of mine, the mother o' seven child'n as are allus a-settin' on my doorstep, an' she comes out of Yorkshire you must know, an' she's bin a streaker in her day (for she was well off wonst was Mrs. Mix afore she 'ad them seven dirty-nosed child'n as sets on her neighbours' doorsteps)--an' she sez, sez she, "My pore Meg" (meanin' me), "I've bin the mother o' fourteen beautiful clean-nosed child'n, an' I've streaked an' buried seven on 'em, so I ought to know somethink about corpuses, an' I tell you this corpse o' your darter's must be streaked an' buried at wonst, for she died in a swownd. An' there's nothink like the parishes for buryin' folk quick, an' I dessay the coffin's ordered by this time, an' I dessay the gent gev you that money just to make you comforble like, seein' as he killed your darter." That's what Mrs. Mix says to me. So the parish comed an' brought a coffin an' tookt her, pore dear. And I've cried myself stupid-like, bein' her pore mother as 'es lost her on'y darter--an' I was just a-tryin' to make myself comfable when this 'ere young toff as seems so werry drunk comes a-rappin' at my door fit to rap the 'ouse down.'

'Has she been buried at all? How can a spiritual body be buried?'

'"Buried at all?" What do you mean by insinivatin' to the pore gal's conflicted mother as she p'raps ain't buried at all? You're a-makin' me cry ag'in. She lays comfable enough underneath a lot of other coffins, in the pauper part of the New North Cimingtary.'

'Underneath a lot of others; how can that be?'

'What! ain't you toffs never seed a pauper finneral? Now that's a pity; and sich nice toffs as they are, a-settin' theirselves up to look arter the darters o' pore folks. P'raps you never thought how we was buried. We're buried, when our time comes, and then they're werry kind to us, the parish toffs is:--It's in a lump--six at a time--as they buries us, and sich nice deal coffins they makes us, the parish toffs does, an' sich nice lamp-black they paints 'em with to make 'em look as if they was covered over with the best black velvid; an' then sich a nice sarmint--none o' your retail sarmints, but a hulsale sarmint--they reads over the lot, an' into one hole they packs us one atop o' the other, jest like a pile o' the werry best Yarmith bloaters, an' that's a good deal more sociable an' comfable, the parish toffs thinks, than puttin' us in single; so it is, for the matter o' that.'

Then I heard no more; for at the intolerable picture called up by the woman's words, my soul in its misery seemed to have soared, scared and trembling, above and beyond the heavens at whose futile gates it had been moaning, till at last it sank at the feet of the mighty power that my love had striven with on the sands of Raxton when the tide was coming in--some pale and cruel ruler whose brow I saw wrinkled with the woman's mocking smile--some frightful columbine-queen, wicked, bowelless, and blind, shaking a starry cap and bells, and chanting--

I lent the drink of Day To gods for feast; I poured the river of Night On gods surceased: Their blood was Nin-ki-gal's.

And there, at the feet of the awful jesting hag, Circumstance, I could only cry 'Winnie! my poor Winnie!' while over my head seemed to pass Necessity and her black ages of despair.

When I came to myself I said to the woman,

'You can point out the grave?'

'Well, yes,' paid slip, turning round sharply; 'but may I ax who the dickens you are?--an' what makes you so cut up about a pore woman's darter? It's right-on beautiful to see how kind gentlemen is nowadays': and she turned and tried, stumbling, to lead the way downstairs.

As we left the room I turned round to look at it. The picture of the mattress, now nearly hidden in the shadows--the picture of the other furniture in the room--two chairs--or rather one and a part of a chair, for the rails of the hack were gone--a table, a large brown jug, the handle of which had been replaced by a piece of string, and a white washhand-basin, with most of the rim broken away, and a shallow tub apparently used for a bath--seemed to sink into my flesh as though bitten in by the etcher's aquafortis. Winifred's sleeping-room!

'Of course she wasn't her daughter,' said Wilderspin meditatively, as we stood on the stairs.

'Not my darter! Why, in course she was. What an imperent thing to say, sure_lie_!'

'There is one thing I wish to say to you,' said he to the woman. 'When I agreed with you as to the sum to be paid for the model's sittings, it was clearly understood that she was to sit to no other artist, and that the match-selling was to cease.

'Well, and 'ave I broke my word?'

'A person has heard her singing and seen her selling baskets,' I said.