After we had passed some way down Ratcliffe Highway, D'Arcy said, 'Here we are then,' and pointed to a shop, or rather two shops, on the opposite side of the street. One window was filled with caged birds; the other with specimens of beautiful Oriental pottery and grotesque curiosities in the shape of Chinese and Japanese statues and carvings.
My brain still rang with the air I had heard the river-boy whistling, but I felt that I must talk about something.
'It is here that you buy your wonderful curiosities and porcelain!' I said.
'Partly; but there is not a curiosity shop in London that I have not ransacked in my time.'
The shop we now entered reminded me of that Raxton Fair which was so much associated with Winnie. Its chief attraction was the advent of Wombwell's menagerie. From the first moment that the couriers of that august establishment came to paste their enormous placards on the walls, down to the sad morning when the caravans left the market-place, Winnie and I and Rhona Boswell had talked 'Wombwell.' It was not merely that the large pictures of the wild animals in action, the more than brassy sound of the cracked brass band, delighted our eyes and ears. Our olfactories also were charmed. The mousy scent of the animals mixed with the scent of sawdust, which to adults was so objectionable, was characterised by us as delicious. All these Wombwell delights came back to me as we entered Jamrach's, and for a time the picture of Winifred prevented my seeing the famous shop. When this passed I saw that the walls of the large room were covered from top to bottom with cages, some of them full of wonderful or beautiful birds, and others full of evil-faced, screeching monkeys.
While D'Arcy was amusing himself with a blue-faced rib-nosed baboon, I asked Mr. Jamrach, an extremely intelligent man, about the singing girl and the Welsh air. But he could tell me nothing, and evidently thought I had been hoaxed.
In a small case by itself was a beautiful jewelled cross, which attracted D'Arcy's attention very much.
'This is not much in your line,' he said to Jamrach.'This isEuropean.'
'It came to me from Morocco,' said Jamrach, 'and it was no doubt taken by a Morocco pirate from some Venetian captive.'
'It is a diamond and ruby cross,' said D'Arcy, 'but mixed with the rubies there are beryls. I am at this moment describing a beryl in some verses. The setting of the stones is surely quite peculiar.'
'Yes,' said Jamrach. 'It is the curiosity of the setting more than the value of the gems which caused it to be sent to me. I have offered it to the London jewellers, but they will only give me the market-price of the stones and the gold.'
While he was talking I pulled out of my breast pocket the cross, which had remained there since I received it from my mother the evening before.
'They are very much alike,' said Jamrach; 'but the setting of these stones is more extraordinary than in mine. And of course they are more than fifty times as valuable.'
D'Arcy turned round to see what we were talking about, when he saw the cross in my hand, and an expression of something like awe came over his face.
'The Moonlight Cross of the Gnostics!' he exclaimed. 'You carry this about in your breast pocket? Put it away, put it away! The thing seems to be alive.'
In a second, however, and before I could answer him, the expression passed from his face, and he took the cross from my hands and examined it.
'This is the most beautiful piece of jewel work I ever saw in my life. I have heard of such things. The Gnostic art of arranging jewels so that they will catch the moon-rays and answer them as though the light were that of the sun, is quite lost.'
We then went and examined Jamrach's menagerie. I found that one source of the interest D'Arcy took in animals was that he was a believer in Baptista Porta's whimsical theory that every human creature resembles one of the lower animals, and he found a perennial amusement in seeing in the faces of animals caricatures of his friends.
With a fund of humour that was exhaustless, he went from cage to cage, giving to each animal the name of some member of the Royal Academy, or of one of his own intimate friends.
On leaving Jamrach's he said to me, 'Suppose we make a day of it and go to the Zoo?'
I agreed, and we took a hansom as soon as we could get one and drove across London towards Regent's Park.
Here the pleasure that he took in watching the movements of the animals was so great that it seemed impossible but that he was visiting the Zoo for the first time. I remembered, however, that he had told me in the morning how frequently he went to these gardens.
But his interest in the animals was unlike my own, and I should suppose unlike the interest of any other man. He had no knowledge whatever of zoology, and appeared to wish for none. His pleasure consisted in watching the curious expressions and movements of the animals and in dramatising them.
On leaving the Zoo, I said, 'The cross you were just now looking at is as remarkable for its history as for its beauty. It was stolen from the tomb of a near relative of mine. I was under a solemn promise to the person upon whose breast it lay to see that it should never be disturbed. But, now that it has been disturbed, to replace it in the tomb would, I fear, be to insure another sacrilege. I wonder what you would do in such a case?'
He looked at me and said, 'As it is evident that we are going to be intimate friends, I may as well confess to you at once that I am a mystic.'
'When did you become so?'
'When? Ask any man who has passionately loved a woman and lost her; ask him at what moment mysticism was forced upon him—at what moment he felt that he must either accept a spiritualistic theory of the universe or go mad; ask him this, and he will tell you that it was at that moment when he first looked upon her as she lay dead, with Corruption's foul fingers waiting to soil and stain. What are you going to do with the cross?'
'Lock it up as safely as I can,' I said; 'what else is there to do with it?'
He looked into my face and said, 'You are a rationalist.'
'I am.'
'You do not believe in a supernatural world?'
'My disbelief of it,' I said, 'is something more than an exercise of the reason. It is a passion, an angry passion. But what should you do with the cross if you were in my place?'
'Put it back in the tomb.'
I had great difficulty in suppressing my ridicule, but I merely said, 'That would be, as I have told you, to insure its being stolen again.'
'There is the promise to the dead man or woman on whose breast it lay.'
'This I intend to keep in the spirit like a reasonable man—not in the letter like—'
'Promises to the dead must be kept to the letter, or no peace can come to the bereaved heart. You are talking to a man whoknows!'
'I will commit no such outrage upon reason as to place a priceless jewel in a place where I know it will be stolen.'
'Youwillreplace the cross in that tomb.'
As he spoke he shook my hands warmly, and said, 'Au revoir.Remember, I shall always be delighted to see you.'
It was not till I saw him disappear amongst the crowd that I could give way to the laughter which I had so much difficulty in suppressing. What a relief it was to be able to do this!
After this I had one or two interviews with our solicitor in Lincoln's Inn Fields, upon important family matters connected with my late uncle's property.
I had been one night to the theatre with my mother and my aunt. The house had been unusually crowded. When the performance was over, we found that the streets were deluged with rain. Our carriage had been called some time before it drew up, and we were standing under the portico amid a crowd of impatient ladies when a sound fell or seemed to fall on my ears which stopped for the moment the very movements of life. Amid the rattle of wheels and horses' feet and cries of messengers about carriages and cabs, I seemed to distinguish a female voice singing:
'I met in a glade a lone little maid.At the foot of y Wyddfa the white;Oh, lissom her feet as the mountain hind,And darker her hair than the night!'
It was the voice of Winifred singing as in a dream.
I heard my aunt say,
'Do look at that poor girl singing and holding out her little baskets! She must be crazed to be offering baskets for sale in this rain and at this time of night.'
I turned my eyes in the direction in which my aunt was looking, but the crowd before me prevented my seeing the singer.
'She is gone, vanished,' said my aunt sharply, for my eagerness to see made me rude.
'What was she like?' I asked.
'She was a young slender girl, holding out a bunch of small fancy baskets of woven colours, through which the rain was dripping. She was dressed in rags, and through the rags shone, here and there, patches of her shoulders; and she wore a dingy red handkerchief round her head. She stood in the wet and mud, beneath the lamp, quite unconscious apparently of the bustle and confusion around her.'
Almost at the same moment our carriage drew up. I lingered on the step as long as possible. My mother made a sign of impatience at the delay, and I got into the carriage. Spite of the rain, I put down the window and leaned out. I forgot the presence of my mother and aunt. I forgot everything. The carriage moved on.
'Winifred!' I gasped, as the certainty that the voice was hers came upon me.
And the dingy London night became illuminated with scrolls of fire, whose blinding, blasting scripture seared my eyes till I was fain to close them: 'Let his children be vagabonds, and beg their bread: let them seek it also out of desolate places.'
So rapidly had the carriage rolled through the rain, and so entirelyhad my long pain robbed me of all presence of mind, that, by the timeI had recovered from the paralysing shock, we had reached PiccadillyCircus. I pulled the check-string.
'Why, Henry!' said my mother, who had raised the window, 'what are you doing? And what has made you turn so pale?'
My aunt sat in indignant silence. 'Ten thousand pardons,' I said, asI stepped out of the carriage, and shook hands with them. 'A suddenrecollection—important papers unsecured at my hotel—business in—inLincoln's Inn Fields. I will call on you in the morning.'
And I reeled down the pavement towards the Haymarket. When I was some little distance from the carriage, I took to my heels and hurried as fast as possible towards the theatre, utterly regardless of the people. I reached the spot breathless. I stood for a moment staring wildly to right and left of me. Not a trace of her was to be seen. I heard a thin voice from my lips, that did not seem my own, ask a policeman, who was now patrolling the neighbourhood, if he had seen a basket-girl singing.
'No,' said the man, 'but I fancy you mean the Essex Street Beauty, don't you? I haven't seen her for a long while now, but her dodge used to be to come here on rainy nights, and stand bare-headed and sing and sell just when the theatres was a-bustin'. She gets a good lot, I fancy, by that dodge.'
'The Essex Street Beauty?'
'Oh, I thought you know'd p'raps. She's a strornary pretty beggar-wench, with blue eyes and black hair, as used to stand at the corner of Essex Street, Strand, and the money as that gal got a-holdin' out her matches and a-sayin' texes out of the Bible must ha' been strornary. So the Essex Street Beauty's bin about here agin on the rainy-night dodge, 'es she? Well, it must have been the fust time for many a long day, for I've never seen her now for a long time. She couldn't ha' stood about here for many minutes; if she had I must ha' seen her.'
I staggered away from him, and passed and repassed the spot many times. Then I extended my beat about the neighbouring streets, loitering at every corner where a basket-girl or a flower-girl might be likely to stand. But no trace of her was to be seen. Meantime the rain had ceased.
All the frightful stories that I had heard or read of the kidnapping of girls came pouring into my mind, till my blood boiled and my knees trembled. Imagination was stinging me to life's very core. Every few minutes I would pass the theatre, and look towards the portico.
The night wore on, and I was unconscious how the time passed. It was not till daybreak that I returned to my hotel, pale, weary, bent.
I threw myself upon my bed: it scorched me.
I could not think. At present I could only see—see what? At one moment a squalid attic, the starlight shining through patched window-panes upon a lonely mattress, on which a starving girl was lying; at another moment a cellar damp and dark, in one corner of which a youthful figure was crouching; and then (most intolerable of all!) a flaring gin-palace, where, among a noisy crowd, a face was looking wistfully on, while coarse and vulgar men were clustering with cruel, wolfish eyes around a beggar-girl. This I saw and more—a thousand things more.
It was insupportable. I rose and again paced the street.
When I called upon my mother she asked me anxious questions as to what had ailed me the previous night. Seeing, however, that I avoided replying to them, she left me after a while in peace.
'Fancy,' said my aunt, who was writing a letter at a little desk between two windows,—'fancy an Aylwin pulling the check-string, and then, with ladies in the carriage and the rain pouring—'
During that day how many times I passed in front of the theatre I cannot say; but at last I thought the very men in the shops must be observing me. Again, though I half poisoned myself with my drug, I passed a sleepless night. The next night was passed in almost the same manner as the previous one.
From this time I felt working within me a great change. A horrible new thought got entire possession of me. Wherever I went I could think of nothing but—the curse. I scorned the monstrous idea of a curse, and yet I was always thinking about it. I was always seeking Winifred—always speculating on her possible fate. I saw no one in society.
My time was now largely occupied with wandering about the streets of London. I began by exploring the vicinity of the theatre, and day after day used to thread the alleys and courts in that neighbourhood. Then I took the eastern direction, and soon became familiar with the most squalid haunts.
My method was to wander from street to street, looking at every poorly-dressed girl I met. Often I was greeted with an impudent laugh, that brought back the sickening mental pictures I have mentioned; and often I was greeted with an angry toss of the head and such an exclamation as, 'What d'ye take me for, staring like that?'
These peregrinations I used to carry far into the night, and thus, as I perceived, got the character at my hotel of a wild young man. The family solicitor wrote to me again and again for appointments which I could not give him.
It had often occurred to me that in a case of this kind the police ought to be of some assistance. One day I called at Scotland Yard, saw an official, and asked his aid. He listened to my story attentively, then said: 'Do you come from the missing party's friends, sir?'
'I am her friend,' I answered—'her only friend.'
'I mean, of course, do you represent her father or mother, or any near relative?'
'She is an orphan; she has no relatives,' I said.
He looked at me steadily and said: 'I am sorry, sir, that neither I nor a magistrate could do anything to aid you.'
'You can do nothing to aid me?' I asked angrily.
'I can do nothing to aid you, sir, in identifying a young woman you once heard sing in the streets of London, with a lady you saw once on the top of Snowdon.'
As I was leaving the office, he said: 'One moment, sir. I don't see how I can take up this case for you, but I may make a suggestion. I have an idea that you would do well to pursue inquiries among the Gypsies.'
'Gypsies!' I said with great heat, as I left the office. 'If you knew how I had already "pursued inquiries" among the Gypsies, you would understand how barren is your suggestion.'
Weeks passed in this way. My aunt's ill-health became rather serious: my mother too was still very unwell. I afterwards learnt that her illness was really the result of the dire conflict in her breast between the old passion of pride and the new invader remorse. There were, no doubt, many discussions between them concerning me. I could see plainly enough they both thought my mind was becoming unhinged.
One night, as I lay thinking over the insoluble mystery of Winifred's disappearance, I was struck by a sudden thought that caused me to leap from my bed. What could have led the official in Scotland Yard to connect Winifred with Gypsies? I had simply told him of her disappearance on Snowdon, and her reappearance afterwards near the theatre. Not one word had I said to him about her early relations with Gypsies. I was impatient for the daylight, in order that I might go to Scotland Yard again. When I did so and saw the official, I asked him without preamble what had caused him to connect the missing girl I was seeking with the Gypsies.
'The little fancy baskets she was selling,' said he. 'They are often made by Gypsies.'
'Of course they are,' I said, hurrying away. 'Why did I not think of this?'
In fact I had, during our wanderings over England and Wales, often seen Sinfi's sister Videy and Rhona Boswell weaving such baskets. Winifred, after all, might be among the Gypsies, and the crafty Videy Lovell might have some mysterious connection with her; for she detested me as much as she loved the gold 'balansers' she could wheedle out of me. Moreover, there were in England the Hungarian Gypsies, with their notions about demented girls, and the Lovells, owing to Sinfi's musical proclivities, were just now much connected with a Hungarian troupe.
The Gypsies I had never seen since leaving them in Wales, and I knew that by this time they were either making their circuit of the English fairs or located in a certain romantic spot called Gypsy Dell, near Rington Manor, the property of my kinsman Percy Aylwin, whither they often went after the earlier fairs were over.
The next evening I went to the Great Eastern Railway station, and taking the train to Rington I walked to Gypsy Dell, where I found the Lovells and Boswells.
Familiar as I was with, the better class of Welsh Gypsies, the camp here was the best display of Romany well-being I had ever seen. It would, indeed, have surprised those who associate all Gypsy life with the squalor which in England, and especially near London, marks the life of the mongrel wanderers who are so often called Gypsies. In a lovely dingle, skirted by a winding, willow-bordered river, and dotted here and there with clumps of hawthorn, were ranged the 'living-waggons' of those trading Romanies who had accompanied the 'Griengroes' to the East Anglian and Midland fairs.
Alongside the waggons was a single large brown tent that for luxuriousness might have been the envy of all Gypsydom. On the hawthorn bushes and the grass was spread, instead of the poor rags that one often sees around a so-called Gypsy encampment, snowy linen, newly washed. The ponies and horses were scattered about the Dell feeding.
I soon distinguished Sinfi's commanding figure near that gorgeous living-waggon of 'orange-yellow colour with red window-blinds' in which she had persuaded me to invest my money at Chester. On the foot-board sat two urchins of the Lovell family, 'making believe' to drive imaginary horses, and yelling with all their might to Rhona Boswell, whose laugh, musical as ever, showed that she enjoyed the game as much as the children did. Sinfi was standing on a patch of that peculiar kind of black ash which burnt grass makes, busy with a fire, over which a tea-kettle was hanging from the usual iron kettle-prop. Among the ashes left by a previous fire her bantam-cock Pharaoh was busy pecking, scratching, and calling up imaginary hens to feast upon his imaginary 'finds.' I entered the Dell, and before Sinfi saw me I was close to her.
She was muttering to the refractory fire as though it were a live thing, and asking it why it refused to burn beneath the kettle. A startled look, partly of pleasure and partly of something like alarm, came over her face as she perceived me. I drew her aside and told her all that had happened in regard to Winifred's appearance as a beggar in London. A strange expression that was new to me overspread her features, and I thought I heard her whisper to herself, 'I will, I will.'
'I knowed the cuss 'ud ha' to ha' its way in the blood, like the bite of a sap' [snake], she murmured to herself. 'And yit the dukkeripen on Snowdon said, clear and plain enough, as they'd surely marry at last. What's become o' the stolen trúshul, brother—the cross?' she inquired aloud. 'That trúshul will ha' to be given to the dead man agin, an' it'll ha' to be given back by his chavo [child] as swore to keep watch over it. But what's it all to me?' she said in a tone of suppressed anger that startled me. 'I ain't a Gorgie,'
'But, Sinfi, the cross cannot be buried again. The reason I have not replaced it in the tomb,—the reason I never will replace it there,—is that the people along the coast know now of the existence of the jewel, and know also of my father's wishes. If it was unsafe in the tomb when only Winnie's father knew of it, it would be a thousandfold more unsafe now.'
'P'raps that's all the better for her an' you: the new thief takes the cuss.'
'This is all folly,' I replied, with the anger of one struggling against an unwelcome half-belief that refuses to be dismissed. 'It is all moonshine-madness. I'll never do it,—not at least while I retain my reason. It was no doubt partly for safety as well as for the other reason that my father wished the cross to be placed in the tomb. It will be far safer now in a cabinet than anywhere else.'
'Reia,' said Sinfi, 'you told me wonst as your great-grandmother was a Romany named Fenella Stanley. I have axed the Scollard about her, and what do you think he says? He says that she wur my great-grandmother too, for she married a Lovell as died.'
'Good heavens, Sinfi! Well, I'm proud of my kinswoman.'
'And he says that Fenella Stanley know'd more about the true dukkerin, the dukkerin of the Romanies, than anybody as were ever heerd on.'
'She seems to have been pretty superstitious,' I said, 'by all accounts. But what has that to do with the cross?'
'You'll put it in the tomb again.'
'Never!'
'Fenella Stanley will see arter that.'
'Fenella Stanley! Why, she's dead and dust.'
'That's what I mean; that's why she can make you do it, and will.'
'Well, well! I did not come to talk about the cross; I want to have a quiet word with you about another matter.'
She sprang away as if in terror or else in anger. Then recovering herself she took the kettle from the prop. I followed her to the tent, which, save that it was made of brown blanket, looked more like a tent on a lawn than a Gypsy-tent. All its comfort seemed, however, to give no great delight to Videy, the cashier and female financier-general of the Lovell family, who, in a state of absorbed untidiness, sitting at the end of the tent upon a palliasse covered with a counterpane of quilted cloth of every hue, was evidently occupied in calculating her father's profits and losses at the recent horse-fair. The moment Videy saw us she hurriedly threw the coin into the silver tea-pot by her side, and put it beneath the counterpane, with that instinctive and unnecessary secrecy which characterised her, and made her such an amazing contrast both to her sister Sinfi and to Rhona Boswell.
After Panuel had received me in his usual friendly manner, we all sat down, partly inside the tent and partly outside, around the white table-cloth that had been spread upon the grass. The Scollard took no note of me; he had no eyes for any one but Rhona Boswell.
When tea was over Sinfi left the camp, and strode across the Dell towards the river. I followed her.
It was not till we reached a turn in the river that is more secluded than any other—a spot called 'Gypsy Ring,' a lovely little spot within the hollow of birch trees and gorse—that she spoke a few words to me, in a constrained tone. Then I said, as we sat down upon a green hillock within the Ring: 'Sinfi, the baskets my aunt saw in Winnie's hand when she was standing in the rain were of the very kind that Videy makes.'
'Oh,that'swhat you wanted to say!' said she; 'you think Videy knows something about Winnie. But that's all a fancy o' yourn, and it's of no use looking for Winnie any more among the Romanies. Even supposin' you did hear the Welsh gillie—and I think it was all a fancy—you can't make nothin' out o' them baskets as your aunt seed. Us Romanies don't make one in a hundud of the fancy baskets as is sold for Gypsy baskets in the streets, and besides, the hawkers and costers what buys 'em of us sells 'em agin to other hawkers and costers, and there ain't no tracin' on 'em.'
I argued the point with her. At last I felt convinced that I was again on the wrong track. By this time the sun had set, and the stars were out. I had noticed that during our talk Sinfi's attention would sometimes seem to be distracted from the matter in hand, and I had observed her give a little start now and then, as though listening to something in the distance.
'What are you listening to?' I inquired at last. 'Reia,' said Sinfi, 'I've been a-listenin' to a v'ice as nobody can't hear on'y me, an' I've bin a-seein' a face peepin' atween the leaves o' the trees as nobody can't see on'y me; my mammy's been to me. I thought she would come here. They say my mammy's mammy wur buried here, an' she wur the child of Fenella, an' that's why it's called Gypsy Ring. The moment I sat down in this Ring a mullo [spirit] come and whispered in my ear, but I can't make out whether it's my mammy or Fenella Stanley, and I can't make out what she said. It's hard sometimes for them as has to gnaw their way out o' the groun' to get their words out clear. [Footnote] Howsomever, this I do know, reia, you an' me must part. I felt as we must part when we was in Wales togither last time, and now I knows it.'
[Footnote: Some Romanies think that spirits rise from the ground.]
'Part, Sinfi! Not if I can prevent it.'
'Reia,' replied Sinfi emphatically, 'when I've wonst made up my mind, you know it's made up for good an' all. When us two leaves this 'ere Ring to-night, you'll turn your ways and I shall turn mine.'
I thought it best to let the subject drop. Perhaps by the time we had left the Ring this mood would have passed. After a minute or so she said,
'You needn't see no fear about not marryin' Winifred Wynne. Youmustmarry her; your dukkeripen on Snowdon didn't show itself there for nothink. When you two was a-settin' by the pool, a-eatin' the breakfiss, I was a-lookin' at you round the corner of the rock. I seed a little kindlin' cloud break away and go floatin' over your heads, and then it shaped itself into what us Romanies calls the Golden Hand. You know what the Golden Hand means when it comes over two sweethearts? You don't believe it? Ask Rhona Boswell! Here she comes a-singin' to herself. She's trying to get away from that devil of a Scollard as says she's bound to marry him. I've a good mind to go and give him a left-hand body-blow in the ribs and settle him for good and all. He means mischief to the Tarno Rye, and Rhona too. Brother, I've noticed for a long while that the Romany blood is a good deal stronger in you than the Gorgio blood. And now mark my words, that cuss o' your feyther's'll work itself out. You'll go to his grave and you'll jist put that trúshul back in that tomb, and arter that, and not afore, you'll marry Winnie Wynne.'
Sinfi's creed did not surprise me: the mixture of guile and simplicity in the Romany race is only understood by the few who know it thoroughly: the race whose profession it is to cheat by fortune-telling, to read the false 'dukkeripen' as being 'good enough for the Gorgios,' believe profoundly in nature's symbols; but her bearing did surprise me.
'Your dukkeripen will come true,' said she; 'but mine won't, for I won't let it.'
'And what is yours?' I asked.
'That's nuther here nor there.'
Then she stood again as though listening to something, and again I thought, as her lips moved, that I heard her whisper, 'I will, I will.'
I had intended to go to London at once after leaving Gypsy Dell, but something that Sinfi told me during our interview impelled me to go on to Raxton Hall, which was so near. The fact that Sinfi was my kinswoman opened up new and exciting vistas of thought.
I understood now what was that haunting sense of recognition which came upon me when I first saw Sinfi at the wayside inn in Wales. Day by day had proofs been pouring in upon me that the strain of Romany blood in my veins was asserting itself with more and more force. Day by day I had come to realise how closely, though the main current of my blood was English, I was affined to the strange and mysterious people among whom I was now thrown—the only people in these islands, as it seemed to me, who would be able to understand a love-passion like mine. And there were many things in the great race of my forefathers which I had found not only unsympathetic to me, but deeply repugnant. In Great Britain it is the Gypsies alone who understand nature's supreme charm, and enjoy her largesse as it used to be enjoyed in those remote times described in Percy Aylwin's poems before the Children of the Roof invaded the Children of the Open Air, before the earth was parcelled out into domains and ownerships as it now is parcelled out. In the mind of the Gorgio, the most beautiful landscape or the most breezy heath or the loveliest meadow-land is cut up into allotments, whether of fifty thousand acres or of two roods, and owned by people. Of ownership of land the Romany is entirely unconscious. The landscape around him is part of Nature herself, and the Romany on his part acknowledges no owner. No doubt he yields toforce majeurein the shape of gamekeeper or constable, but that is because he has no power to resist it. Nature to him is as free and unowned by man as it was to the North American Indian in his wigwam before the invasion of the Children of the Roof.
During the time that I was staying in Flintshire and near Capel Curig, rambling through the dells or fishing in the brooks, it was surprising how soon the companionship of a Gorgio would begin to pall upon me. And here the Cymric race is just as bad as the Saxon. The same detestable habit of looking upon nature as a paying market-garden, the same detestable inquiry as to who was the owner of this or that glen or waterfall, was sure at last to make me sever from him. But as to Sinfi, her attitude towards nature, though it was only one of the charms that endeared her to me, was not the least of them. There was scarcely a point upon which she and I did not touch.
And what about her lack of education? Was that a drawback? Not in the least. The fact that she knew nothing of that traditional ignorance which for ages has taken the name of knowledge—that record of the foolish cosmogonies upon which have been built the philosophies and the social systems of the blundering creature Man—the fact that she knew nothing of these gave an especial piquancy to everything she said. I had been trying to educate myself in the new and wonderful cosmogony of growth which was first enunciated in the sixties, and was going to be, as I firmly believed, the basis of a new philosophy, a new system of ethics, a new poetry, a new everything. But in knowledge of nature as a sublime consciousness, in knowledge of the human heart, Sinfi was far more learned than I. And believing as I did that education will in the twentieth century consist of unlearning, of unlading the mind of the trash previously called knowledge, I could not help feeling that Sinfi was far more advanced, far more in harmony than I could hope to be With the new morning of Life of which we are just beginning to see the streaks of dawn.
'I must go and see Fenella's portrait,' I said, as I Walked briskly towards Raxton.
When I reached Raxton Hall I seemed to startle the butler and the servants, as though I had come from the other world.
I told the butler that I should sleep there that night, and then went at once to the picture gallery and stood before Reynolds' famous picture of Fenella Stanley as the Sibyl. The likeness to Sinfi was striking. How was it that it had not previously struck me more forcibly? The painter had evidently seized the moment when Fenella's eyes expressed that look of the seeress which Sinfi's eyes, on occasion, so powerfully expressed. I stood motionless before it while the rich, warm light of evening bathed it in a rosy radiance. And when the twilight shadows fell upon it, and when the moon again lit it up, I stood there still. The face seemed to pass into my very being, and Sinfi's voice kept singing in my ears, 'Fenella Stanley's dead and dust, and that's why she can make you put that cross in your feyther's tomb, and she will, she will.'
I left the picture and went into the library: for I bethought me of that sheaf of Fenella's letters to my great-grandfather which he had kept so sacredly, and which had come to me as representative of the family. My previous slight inspection of them had shown me what a wonderful woman she was, how full of ideas the most original and the most wild. The moment a Gypsy-woman has been taught to write there comes upon her a passion for letter-writing.
Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the illiterate locutions and the eccentric orthography of Fenella's letters and the subtle remarks and speculations upon the symbols of nature.—the dukkeripen of the woods, the streams, the stars, and the winds. But when I came to analyse the theories of man's place in nature expressed in the ignorant language of this Romany heathen, they seemed to me only another mode of expressing the mysticism of the religious enthusiast Wilderspin, the more learned and philosophic mysticism of my father, and the views of D'Arcy, the dreamy painter.
As I rode back to London, I said to myself, 'What change has come over me? What power has been gradually sapping my manhood? Why do I, who was so self-reliant, long now so passionately for a friend to whom to unburthen my soul—one who could give me a sympathy as deep and true as that I got from Sinfi Lovell, and yet the sympathy of a mind unclouded by ignorant superstitions?'
With the exception of D'Arcy, whose advice as to the disposal of the cross had proclaimed him to be as superstitious as Sinfi herself, not a single friend had I in all London. Indeed, besides Lord Sleaford (a tall, burly man with the springy movement of a prize-tighter, with blue-grey eyes, thick, close-cropped hair, and a flaxen moustache, who had lately struck up a friendship with my mother) I had not even an acquaintance. Cyril Aylwin, whom I had not seen since we parted in Wales, was now on the Continent with Wilderspin. Strange as it may seem, I looked forward with eagerness to the return of this light-hearted jester. Cyril's sagacity and knowledge of the world had impressed me in Wales; but his cynical attitude, whether genuine or assumed, towards subjects connected with deep passion, had prevented my confiding in him. He must, I knew, have gathered from Sinfi, and from other sources, that I was mourning the loss of a Welsh girl in humble life; but during our very brief intercourse in Wales neither of us had mentioned the matter to the other. Now, however, in my present dire strait I longed to call in the aid of his penetrative mind.
On reaching London I resumed my wanderings through the London streets. Bitter as these wanderings were, my real misery now did not begin until I got to bed. Then began the terrible struggle of the soul that wrestles with its ancestral fleshly prison—that prison whose warders are the superstitions of bygone ages. 'Have you not seen the curse literally fulfilled?' ancestral voices of the blood—voices Romany and Gorgio—seemed whispering in my ears. 'Have you not heard the voice of his daughter upon whose head the curse of your dead father has fallen a beggar in the street, while not all your love can succour her or reach her?'
And then my soul would cry out in its agony, 'Most true, Fenella Stanley—most true, Philip Aylwin; but before I will succumb to such a theory of the universe as yours, a theory which reason laughs at and which laughs at reason, I will die—die by this hand of mine: this flesh that imprisons me in a world of mocking delusion shall be destroyed, but first the symbol itself of your wicked, cruel old folly shall go.'
I would then leap from my bed, light a candle, unlock my cabinet, take out the cross, and holding it aloft prepare to dash it against the wall, when my hand would be arrested by the same ancestral voices, Romany and Gorgio, whispering in my ears and at my heart,
'If you break that amulet, how shall you ever be able to see what would be the effect upon Winnie's fate of its restoration to your father's tomb?'
And then I would laugh aloud and mock the voices of Fenella Stanley and Philip Aylwin and millions of other voices that echoed or murmured or bellowed through half a million years, echoed or murmured or bellowed from European halls and castles, from Gypsy tents, from caves of palæolithic man.
'How shall you stay the curse from working in the blood of the accursed one?' the voices would say. And then I would laugh again till I feared the people in the hotel would hear me and take me for a maniac.
But then my aunt's picture of a beggar-girl standing in the rain would fill my eyes and the whispers would grow louder than the voice of the North Sea in the March wind: 'Look atthat. How dare you leave undone anything, howsoever wild, which might seem to any one—even to an illiterate Gypsy, even to a crazy mystic—a means of finding Winifred? What is the meaning of the great instinct which has always conquered the soul in its direst need—which has always driven man when in the grip of unbearable calamity to believe in powers that are unseen? What though that scientific reason of yours tells you that Winifred's misfortunes have nothing to do with any curse? what though your reason tells you that all these calamities may be read as being the perfectly natural results of perfectly natural causes? Is the voice of man's puny reason clothed with such authority that it dares to answer his heart, which knows nothing but that it bleeds? The terrible facts of the case may be read in two ways. With an inscrutable symmetry these facts may and do fit in with the universal theory of the power of the spirit-world to execute a curse from the grave. Look at that beggar in the street! How dare you ignore the theory of the sorrowing soul, the logic of the lacerated heart, even though your reason laughs it to scorn?'
And then at last my laughter would turn to moans, and, replacing the cross in the cabinet, I would creep hack to my bed ashamed, like a guilty thing—ashamed before myself.
But the more I felt at my throat the claws of the ancestral ogre Superstition, the more enraged I became with myself for feeling them there. And the auger against my ancestors' mysticism grew with the growing consciousness that I was rapidly yielding to the very same mysticism myself. And then I would get up again and take from my escritoire the sheaf of Fenella Stanley's letters which I had brought from Raxton, and read again those stories about curses, such as that about the withering of a Romany family under a dead man's curse which Winnie had described to me that night on the sands.
I was delighted to be told by Sleaford, whom I met one afternoon in Piccadilly, that Cyril had returned to London within the last few days. 'He is appointed artist-in-chief of the new comic paper,The Caricaturist,said Sleaford, 'and is in great feather. I have just been calling upon him.'
'The very man I want to see,' I replied. Sleaford thereupon directed me to Cyril's studio 'You'll find him at work,' said he, 'doin' a caricature of Wilderspin's great picture, "Faith and Love." Mother Gudgeon is sittin' as his model. He does everything from models, you know.'
'Mother Gudgeon?'
'A female costermonger that he picked up some where in the slums, the funniest woman in London: haw! haw! I promise you she'll make you laugh when Cyril draws her out.'
He then began to talk upon the subject which interested him above all others, the smartness and swiftness of his yacht. 'I am trying to persuade your mother and aunt to go for a cruise with me, and I think I shall succeed.'
He directed me to the studio, and we parted.
I found Cyril in a large and lofty studio in Chelsea, filled with the curiously carved black furniture of Bombay, mixed, for contrast, with a few Indian cabinets of carved and fretted ivory exquisitely wrought. He greeted me cordially. The walls were covered with Japanese drawings. I began by asking him about The Caricaturist.
'Well,' said he, 'now that the House of Commons has become a bear-garden, and t'other House a waxwork show, and the intellect and culture of the country are leaving politics to dummies and cads, how can the artistic mind condescend to caricature the political world—a world that has not only ceased to be intelligent, but has even ceased to be funny? The quarry ofThe Caricaturistwill be literature, science, and art. Instead of wasting artistic genius upon such small fry as premiers, diplomatists, and cabinet ministers, our cartoons will be caricatures of the pictures of Millais, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Watts, Sandys, Whistler, Wilderspin: our letterpress will be Aristophanic parodies of Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, Arnold, Morris, Swinburne; game worth flying at, my boy! The art-world is in a dire funk, I can tell you, for the artistic epidermis has latterly grown genteel and thin.'
Already I was beginning to ask myself whether it was possible to make a confidant of this inscrutable cynic. 'You are fond of Oriental things?' I said, wishing to turn the subject. I looked round at the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese monstrosities scattered about the room.
'That,' said he, pointing to a picture of a woman (apparently drunk) who was amusing herself by chasing butterflies, while a number of broad-faced, mischievous-looking children were teasing her—'that is the masterpiece of Hokusai. The legend in the corner is "Kiyó-jo chó ni tawamureru," which, according to the lying Japanese scholars, means nothing more than "A cracked woman chasing butterflies." It was left for me to discover that it represents Yoka, the goddess of Fun, sportively chasing the butterfly souls of men, while the urchins, the little Yokas, are crying, "Ma! you're screwed."'
'But what are these quaint figures?' I asked, pointing to certain drawings of an obese Japanese figure, grinning with lazy good-humour above several of the cabinets.
'Hoteï, the fat god of enjoyment.'
'A Japanese god?' I asked.
'Yes, nothing artistic is quite right now unless it has a savour of blue mould or Japan. Wonderful people, the Japanese, to have discovered the Jolly Hoteï. And here is Hoteï's wife, the goddess-queen Yoka herself—the real masquerader behind that mystic veil which has so enveloped and bemuddled the mind of poor Wilderspin. She is to figure in the first number ofThe Caricaturist.'
He pointed to an object I had only partially observed: a broad-faced burly woman, of about forty-five years of age, in an eccentric dress of Japanese silks, standing on the model-throne between two lay figures. 'Good heavens!' I exclaimed, 'why, she's alive.'
'An' kickin', sir,' said a voice that was at once strident and unctuous. Owing to the almond shape of her sparkling black eyes and the flatness of her nose, the bridge of which had been broken (most likely in childhood), she looked absurdly like a Japanese woman, save that upon her quaintly-cut mouth, curving slightly upwards horse-shoe fashion, there was that twitter of humorous alertness which is perhaps rarely seen in perfection except among the lower orders, Celtic or Saxon, of London. Her build was that of a Dutch fisher-woman. The set of her head on her muscular neck showed her to be a woman of immense strength. But still more was her great physical power indicated by her hands, the fingers of which seemed to have a grip like that of an eagle's claws.
I then perceived upon an easel a large drawing. 'I have not seen Wilderspin's "Faith and Love,"' I said; 'but this, I see, must be a caricature of it.'
In it the woman figured as Isis, grinning beneath a veil held over her head by two fantastically-dressed figures—one having the face of Darwin, the other the face of Wilderspin.
'Allow me,' said Cyril, 'to introduce you to the Goddess Yoka, the true Isis or goddess of bohemianism and universal joke, who, when she had the chance of I making a rational and common-sense universe, preferred amusing herself with flamingoes, dromedaries, ring-taile monkeys, and men.'
'Pardon me,' I said; 'I merely called to see you. Good afternoon.'
'Allow me,' said he, turning to the woman, 'to introduce to your celestial majesty Mr. Henry Aylwin, a kinsman of mine, whose possessions in Little Egypt are as brilliant (judging from the colours of his royal waggon) as are his possessions in Philistia.'
The woman made me a curtsey of much gravity. 'And allow me to introduceyou,' he said, turning to me, 'to the real original Natura Mystica,—she who for ages upon ages has been trying by her funny goings-on to teach us that "thePrincipium hylarchicumof the cosmos" (to use the simple phraseology of a great spiritualistic painter) is the benign principle of joke.'
The woman made me another curtsey. 'You forget your exalted position, Mrs. Gudgeon,' said Cyril; 'when a mystic goddess-queen is so condescending as to curtsey she should be careful not to bend too low. Man is a creature who can never with safety be treated with too much respect.'
'We's all so modest in Primrose Court, that's the wust on us,' replied the woman. 'But, Muster Cyril, sir, I don't think you've noticed that the queen'st'othereye's got dry now.'
Cyril gravely poured her out a glass of foaming ale from a bottle that stood upon a little Indian bamboo-table, and handed it to her carefully over the silks, saying to me,
'Her majesty's elegant way of hinting that she likes to wet both eyes!'
Such foolery as this and at such a time irritated me sorely; but there was no help for it now. Whether I should or should not open to him the subject that had taken me thither, I must, I saw, let him have his humour till the woman was dismissed.
'And now, goddess,' said he, 'while I am doing justice to the design of your nose—'
'You can't do that, sir,' interjected the creature, 'it's sich a beauty, ha! ha! I allus say that when I do die, I shall die a-larfin'. They calls me "Jokin' Meg" in Primrose Court. I shall die a-larfin', they say in Primrose Court, and so I shall—unless I die a-cryin',' she added in an utterly different and tragic voice which greatly struck me.
'While I am trying to do justice to that beautiful bridge you must tell my friend about yourself and your daughter, and how you and she first became two shining lights in the art world of London.'
'You makes me blush,' said the woman, 'an' blow me if blushin' ain't bin an' madet'othereye dry.'
She then took another glass of ale, grinned, shook herself, as though preparing for an effort, and said,
'Well you must know, sir, as my name's Meg Gudgeon, leaseways that was my name till my darter chrissened me Mrs. Knocker, and I lives in Primrose Court, Great Queen Street, and my reg'lar perfession is a-sellin' coffee "so airly in the mornin'," and I've got a darter as ain't quite so 'ansom as me, bein' the moral of her father as is over the water a-livin' in the fine 'Straley. And you must know, sir, that one of summer's day there comes a knock at our door as sends my 'eart into my mouth and makes me cry out, "The coppers, by jabbers!" and when I goes down and opens the door, lo! and behold, there stan's a chap wi' great goggle eyes, dressed all in shiny black, jest like a Quaker.' (Here she made a noise between a laugh and a cough.) 'I allus say that when I do die I shall die a-larfin'—unless I die a-cryin',' she added, in the same altered voice that had struck me before.
'Well, mother,' said Cyril, 'and what did the shiny Quaker say?'
'They calls me "Jokin' Meg" in Primrose Court. The shiny Quaker, 'e axes if my name is Gudgeon. "Well," sez I, "supposin' as my nameisGudgeon,—I don't say it is," says I, "but supposin' as it is,—what then?" sez I. "Butisthat your name?" sez 'e. "Supposin' as it was," sez I, "what then?" "Will you answer my simple kervestion?" sez 'e. "Is your name Mrs. Gudgeon, or ain't it not?" sez 'e. "An' willyouanswermysimple kervestion, Mr. Shiny Quaker?" sez I. "Supposin' my name was Mrs. Gudgeon,—I don't say itis, but supposin' it was,—what's that to you?" sez I, for I thought my poor bor Bob what lives in the country had got into trouble agin and had sent for me.'
'Go on, mother,' said Cyril, 'what did the shiny Quaker say then?'
'"Well then," sez 'e, "if your name is Mrs. Gudgeon, there is a pootty gal as is, I am told, a-livin' along o' you." "Oh, oh, my fine shiny Quaker gent," sez I, an' I flings the door wide open an' there I stan's in the doorway, "it'sheryou wants, is it?" sez I. "And pray what does my fine shiny Quaker gent want wi' my darter?" "Your darter?" sez 'e, an opens 'is mouth like this, and shets it agin like a rat-trap. "Yis, my darter," sez I. "I s'pose," sez I, "you think she ain't 'ansom enough to be my darter. No more she ain't," sez I; "but she takes arter her father, an' werry sorry she is for it," sez I. "I want to put her in the way of 'arnin' some money," sez 'e. "Oh,doyou?" sez I. "How very kind! I'm sure it does a pore woman's 'eart good to see how kind you gents is to us pore women's pootty darters," sez I,—"even shiny Quaker gents as is generally so quiet. You're not the fust shiny gent," sez I, "as 'ez followed 'er 'um, I can tell you,—not the fust by a long way; but up to now," sez I, "I've allus managed to send you all away with a flea in your ears, cuss you for a lot of wicious warm exits, young and old," sez I, "an' if you don't get out," sez I—"My good woman, you mistake my attentions," sez 'e. "Oh no, I don't," sez I, "not a bit on it. It's sich ole sinners as you in your shiny black coats," sez I, "as I neverdomistake, and if you don't git out there's a pump-'andle behind this werry door, as my poor bor Bob brought up from the country for me to sell for him—" "My good woman," sez 'e, "I am a hartist," sez 'e. "What's that?" sez I. "A painter," sez 'e. "A painter, air you? you don't look it," sez I. "P'raps it's holiday time with ye," sez I, "and that makes you look so varnishy. Well, and what do painters more nor any other trade want with pore women's pootty darters?" sez I,—"more nor plumbers nor glaziers, nor bricklayers, for the matter of that?" sez I. "But I ain't a 'ousepainter," sez 'e; "I paints picturs, and I want this gal to set as a moral," sez 'e. "A moral! an' what's a moral?" sez I. "You ain't a-goin' to play none o' your shiny-coat larks wi' my pootty darter," sez I. "I wants to paint her portrait," sez 'e, "an' then put it in a pictur." "Oh," sez I, "you wants to paint her portrait 'cause she's such a pootty gal, an' then you wants to make believe you drawed it out of your own 'ead, an' sell it," sez I. "Oh, but you're a downy one, you are, an' no mistake," sez I. "But I likes you none the wuss for that. I likes a downy chap, an' I don't see no objection to that; but how much will you give to paint my pootty darter?" sez I. "P'raps I'd better come in," sez he. "P'raps you 'ad, if we're a-comin' to bisniss," sez I; "so jest make a long leg an' step over them dirty-nosed child'n o' Mrs. Mix's, a-settin' on my doorstep, an' I dessay we sha'n't quarrel over a 'undud p'un' or two," sez I. An' then I bust out a-larfin' agin—I shall die a-larfin'.' And then she added suddenly in the same tone of sadness, 'if I don't die a-cryin'.'
'Really, mother,' said Cyril, 'it is very egotistical of you to interrupt your story with prophecies about the mood in which you will probably shuffle off the Gudgeon coil and take to Gudgeon wings. It is the shiny Quaker we want to know about.'
'And then the shiny Quaker comes in,' said the woman, 'and I shets the door, being be'ind 'im, and that skears'imfor a moment, till I bust out a-larfin': "Oh, you needn't be afeard," sez I;—"when we burgles a Quaker in Primrose Court we never minces 'im for sossingers, 'e's so 'ily in 'is flavour." Well, sir, to cut a long story short, I agrees to take my pootty darter to the Quaker gent's studero; an' I takes 'er nex' day, an' 'e puts her in a pictur. But afore long,' continued the old woman, leering round at Cyril, 'lo! and behold, a young swell, p'raps a young lord in disguise (I don't want to be pussonal, an' so I sha'n't tell his name), 'e comes into that studero one day when I was a-settlin' up with the Quaker gent for the week's pay, an' he sets an' admires me, till I sets an' blushes as I'm a-blushin' at this werry moment; an' when I gits 'ome, I sez to Polly Onion (that's a pal o' mine as lives on the ground floor), I sez, "Poll, bring my best lookin'-glass out o' my bowdore, an' let's have a look at my old chops, for I'm blowed if there ain't a young swell, p'raps a young lord in disguise, as 'ez fell 'ead over ears in love with me." And sure enough when I goes back to the studero the werry nex' time, my young swell 'e sez to me, "It's your own pootty face as I wants formymoral. I dessay your darter's a stunner—I ain't seen her yit—but she cain't be nothin' to you." And I sez to 'im, "In course she ain't, for she takes arter her father's family, pore gal, and werry sorry she is for it."'
At this moment a servant entered and said Mr. Wilderspin was waiting in the hall.
All hope having now fled of my getting a private word with Cyril that afternoon, I was preparing to slip I away; but he would not let me go.
'I don't want Wilderspin to know about the caricature till it is finished,' whispered he to me; 'so I told Bunner never to let him come suddenly upon me. You'd better be off, mother,' he said to the old woman, 'and come again to-morrow.'
She bustled up and, throwing off the Japanese finery, left the room, while Cyril removed the drawing from the easel and hid it away.
'Isn't she delightful?' ejaculated Cyril.
'Delightful! What, that old wretch? All that interests me in her is the change in her voice after she says she will die laughing.'
'Oh,' said Cyril, 'she seems to be troubled with a drunken son in the country somewhere, who is always getting into scrapes. Wilderspin's in love with her daughter, a wonderfully beautiful girl, the finding of whom at the very moment when he was in despair for the want of the right model gave the final turn to his head. He thinks she was sent to him from Paradise by his mother's spirit! He does, I assure you.'
'Wilderspin in love with a model!'
'Oh, notà laRaphael.'
'If you think Wilderspin to be in love with any woman, you little know what love is,' I exclaimed. 'He is in love with his art and with that beautiful memory of his mother's self-sacrifice which has shattered his reason, but built up his genius. Except as a means towards the production of those pictures that possess him, no model is anything more to him than his palette-knife. Shall you be alone this evening?'
'This evening I dine at Sleaford's. To-morrow I am due in Paris.'
Wilderspin, who had now entered the studio, seemed genuinely pleased to see me again, and told me that in a few days he should be able to borrow 'Faith and Love' of its owner for the purpose of beginning a replica of it, and hoped then to have the pleasure of showing it to me.
'I observed Mrs. Gudgeon in the hall,' said he to Cyril. 'To think that so unlovely a woman should, through an illusion of the senses, seem to be the mere material mother of her who was sent to me from the spirit-world in the very depths of my despair! Wonderful are the ways of the spirit-world. Ah, Mr. Aylwin, did it never occur to you how important is the expression of the model from whom you work?'
'I am not a painter,' I said, 'only an amateur,' trying to stop a conversation that might run on for an hour.
'It has never occurred to you! That is strange. Let me read to you a passage upon this subject just published inThe Art Review, written by the great painter D'Arcy.'
He then took from Cyril's table a number ofThe Art Review, and began to read aloud:—
It is a curious thing that not only the general public, but the art connoisseurs and the writers upon art, although they know full well how a painter goes to work in painting a picture, speak and write as though they thought that the head of a beautiful woman was drawn from the painter's inner consciousness, instead of from the real woman who sits to him as a model. Notwithstanding all the technical excellence of Raphael, his extraordinary good luck in finding the model that suited his genius had very much to do with his enormous success and fame. And with all Michael Angelo's instinct for grandeur, if he had not been equally lucky in regard to models, he could never adequately have expressed that genius. It is impossible to give vitality to the painting of any head unless the artist has nature before him; this is why no true judge of pictures was ever deceived as to the difference between an original and a copy. It stands to reason that in every picture of a head, howsoever the model's features may be idealised, Nature's own handiwork and mastery must dominate.
Here Cyril gently took the magazine from Wilderspin's hand, but did not silence him. 'As I told you in Wales,' said he to me, 'I had an abundance of imagination, but I wanted some model in order to realise it. I could never meet a face that came anything nigh my own ideal of expression as the purely spiritual side of the beauty of woman; and until I did that I knew that I should achieve nothing whereby the world might recognise a new power in art. In vain did I try to idealise such faces as did not please me. And this was because nothing could satisfy me but the perfect type of expression which not even Leonardo nor any other painter in the world had found—the true Romantic type.'
'I understand you, Mr. Wilderspin,' I said. 'This I perfect type of expression you eventually found—'
'In the daughter,' said Cyril, 'of the goddess Gudgeon.'
'By the blessing of Mary Wilderspin in heaven,' said Wilderspin.
And then the talk between the two friends ran upon artistic matters, and I heard no more, for my mind was wandering up and down the London streets.
Wilderspin and I left the house together. As we walked along, side by side, I said to him: 'You spoke just now of your mother's blessing. Am I really to understand that you in an age like this believe in the power of human blessings and human curses?'
'Do I believe in blessings and curses, Mr. Aylwin?' said Wilderspin solemnly. 'You are asking me whether I am with or without what your sublime father calls the "most powerful of the primary instincts of man." He tells us inThe Veiled Queenthat "Even in this material age of ours there is not a single soul that does not in its inner depths acknowledge the power of the unseen world. The most hardened materialist," says he, "believes in what he calls sometimes 'luck' and sometimes 'fortune.'" Let me advise you, Mr. Aylwin, to study the voice of your inspired father. I will send a set of his writings to your hotel to-morrow. And, Mr. Aylwin, my duty compels me to speak very plainly to you upon a subject that has troubled me since I had the honour of meeting you in Wales. There is but one commandment in the decalogue to which a distinct promise of reward is attached; it is that which bids us honour our fathers and our mothers. Good-day, sir.'
Shortly after this I met my mother at our solicitor's office according to appointment. As she was on the eve of departing for the Continent, it was necessary that various family matters should be arranged. On the day following, as I was about to leave my hotel to call at Cyril's studio, rather doubtful, after the frivolity I had lately witnessed, as to whether or not I should unburden my heart to such a man, he entered my room in company with Wilderspin, the latter carrying a parcel of books.
'I have brought your father's works,' Wilderspin said.
'Thank you very much,' I replied, taking the books. 'And when am I to call and see your picture? Have you yet got it back from the owner?'
'"Faith and Love" is now in my studio,' he replied; 'but I will ask you not to call upon me yet for a few days. I hope to be too busily engaged upon another picture to afford a moment to any one save the model—that is,' he added with a sigh, 'should she make her appearance.'
'A picture of his called "Ruth and Boaz,"' interposed Cyril. 'Wilderspin is repainting the face from that favourite model of his of whom you heard so much in Wales. But the fact is the model is rather out of sorts at this moment, and Wilderspin is fearful that she may not turn up to-day. Hence the melancholy you see on his face. I try to console him, however, by assuring him that the daughter of a mamma with such a sharp appreciation of half-crowns as the lady you saw at my studio the other day is sure to turn up in due time as sound as a roach.'
Wilderspin shook his head gravely.
'Good heavens!' I muttered, 'when am I to hear the last of painters' models?' Then turning to Wilderspin, I said,
'This is the model to whom you feel so deeply indebted?'
'Deeply indebted, indeed!' exclaimed he in a fervid tone, taking a chair and playing with his hat between his knees, in his previous fashion when beginning one of his monologues. 'When I began "Faith and Love" I worked for weeks and months and years, having but one thought, how to give artistic rendering to the great idea of the Renascence of Wonder in Art symbolised in the vignette in your father's third edition. I was very poor then; but to live upon bread and water and paint a great picture, and know that you are being watched by loving eyes above,—there is no joy like that. I found a model—a fine and beautiful woman, the same magnificent blonde who sat for so many of the Master's greatest pictures. For a long time my work delighted me; but after awhile a suspicion, and then a sickening dread, came upon me that all was not well with the picture. And then the withering truth broke in upon me, the scales fell from my eyes—the model's face was beautiful, but it was not right; the expression I wanted was as far off as ever; there was but one right expression in the world, and that I could not find. Ah! is there any pain like that of discovering that all the toil of years has been in vain, that the best you can do—the best that the spiritual world permits you to do—is as far off the goal as when you began?'
'And so you failed after all, Mr. Wilderspin?' I said, anxious to get him away so that I might talk to Cyril alone upon the one subject at my heart.
'I told the model I should want her no more,' said Wilderspin, 'and for two days and nights I sat in the studio in a dream, and could get nothing to pass my lips but bread and water. Then it was that Mary Wilderspin, my mother, remembered me, blessed me—sent me a spiritual body—'
'For God's sake!' I whispered to Cyril, 'take the good madman away; you don't know how his prattle harrows me just now.'
'Ah! never,' said Wilderspin, 'shall I forget that sunny morning when was first revealed to me—'
'My dear fellow,' said Cyril, 'to tell the adventures of that sunny morning would, as I know from experience, keep us here for the next three hours. So, as I must not miss my train, and as you cannot spare a second from "Ruth and Boaz," come along.'
While I was accompanying them through the corridors of the hotel, Cyril said: 'You say he is not in love with his model? Don't you see the sulky looks he gives me? I was the innocent cause of an unlucky catastrophe with her. I'll tell you about that, however, another time. Good-bye; I'm off to Paris.'
'When you return to London,' I said to Cyril, 'I wish to consult you upon, a matter that concerns me deeply.'
On re-entering my room, as I stood and gazed at my father's bookThe Veiled Queen, I understood something about that fascination which the bird feels who goes fluttering to the serpent's jaws from sheer repulsion. 'Am I indeed,' I asked myself, 'that same Darwinian student who in Switzerland not long since turned over in scorn these pages, where are enshrined superstitious stories as gross as any of those told in Fenella Stanley's ignorant letters?'
In a chapter on 'Love and Death' certain passages showed me how great must have been the influence of this book on Wilderspin, and I no longer wondered at what the painter had told me in Wales. I will give one passage here, because it had a strange effect on my imagination, as will be soon seen:
'There is an old Babylonian tablet of Nin-ki-gal, the Queen of Death, whose abode the tablet thus describes:—
To the house men enter, but cannot depart from;To the road men go, but cannot return;The abode of darkness and famine,Where earth is their food—their nourishment clay.Light is not seen; in darkness they dwell:Ghosts, like birds, flutter their wings there;On the gate and the gate-posts the dust lies undisturbed.'
Another part of the inscription describes Nin-ki-gal on her throne scattering over the earth the 'Seeds of Life and Death,' and chanting her responses to the Sibyl, and to the prayers of the shapes kneeling around her, the dead gods and the souls of all the sons of men. And I often wonder whether my ancestress, Fenella Stanley, had any traditional knowledge of the Queen of Death when she had her portrait painted as the Sibyl. But whether she had or not, I never think of this Babylonian Sibyl kneeling before Nin-ki-gal, surrounded by gods and men, without seeing in the Sibyl's face the grand features of Fenella Stanley.