Part 45 (2/2)

'No,' replied Wilderspin firmly. 'On that point who is a better judge than the painter of ”Faith and Love”? She did not want food. The colour of the skin was not--was not--such as I have seen--when a woman is dying for want of food.'

'G.o.d bless you, Wilderspin, G.o.d bless you! But what then?--what followed?'

'Well, Mr. Aylwin, I stood for some time gazing at her, muttering thanks to my mother for what I had found. I then went up to her, and asked her for a box of matches. She held me out a box, mechanically, as it seemed, and, when I had taken it of her, she held out her hand just as though she had been a real earthly beggar-girl; but that was part of the beneficent illusion of Heaven.'

'That was for the price, don't you know?' said Sleaford. 'What did you give her?'

'I gave her a s.h.i.+lling, my lord, which she looked at for some time in a state of bewilderment. She then began to feel about her as if for something.'

'She was feelin' for the change, don't you know?' said Sleaford, not in the least degree perceiving how these interruptions of a prosaic mind were maddening me.

'I told her that I wanted to speak to her,' continued Wilderspin, 'and asked her where she lived. She gave me the same bewildered, other-world look with which she had regarded the s.h.i.+lling, a look which seemed to say, ”Go away now: leave me alone!” As I did not go, she began to appear afraid of me, and moved away towards Temple Bar, and then crossed the street. I followed, as far behind as I could without running the danger of losing sight of her, to a wretched place running out of Great Queen Street. Holborn, which I afterwards found was called Primrose Court, and when I got there she had disappeared in one of the squalid houses opening into the court. I knocked at the first door once or twice before an answer came, and then a tiny girl with the face of a woman opened it. ”Is there a beggar-girl living here?” I asked. ”No,” answered the child in a sharp, querulous voice. ”You mean Meg Gudgeon's gal wot sings and does the rainy-night dodge. She lives next house.” And the child slammed the door in my face. I knocked at the next door, and after waiting for a minute it was opened by a short, middle-aged woman, with black eyes and a flattened nose, who stared at me, and then said, ”A Quaker, by the looks o' ye.” She had the strident voice of a raven, and she smelt, I thought, of gin.'

'But, Mr. Wilderspin, Mr. Wilderspin, you said the girl was safe!'

It was my mother's voice, but so loud, sharp, and agonised was it that it did not seem to be her voice at all. In that dreadful moment, however, I had no time to heed it. At the description of the hideous den and the odious Mrs. Gudgeon, whose face as I had seen it in Cyril's studio had haunted me in the crypt, a dreadful shudder pa.s.sed through my frame; an indescribable sense of nausea stirred within me; and for a moment I felt as though the pains of dissolution were on me. And there was something in Wilderspin's face--what was it?--that added to my alarm. 'Stay for a moment,' I said to him; 'I cannot yet bear to hear any more.'

'I know the dread that has come upon you, and upon your kind, sympathetic mother,' said he; 'but she you are disturbed about was not a prisoner in the kind of place my words seem to describe.'

'But the woman?' said my mother. 'How could she be safe in such hands?'

'Has he not said she is safe?' I cried, in a voice that startled even my own ears, so loud and angry it was, and yet I hardly knew why.

'You forget,' said Wilderspin, turning to my mother, 'that the whole spiritual world was watching over her.'

'But was the place very--was it so very squalid?' said my mother.

'Pray describe it to us, Mr. Wilderspin; I am really very anxious.'

'No!' I said; 'I want no description: I shall go and see for myself.'

'But; Henry, I am most anxious to know about this poor girl, and I want Mr. Wilderspin to tell us how and where he found her.'

'The ”poor girl” concerns me alone, mother. Our calamities--Winnie's and mine--are between us two and G.o.d....You engaged her, Wilderspin, of the woman whom I saw at Cyril's studio, to sit as a model? What pa.s.sed when she came?'

'The woman brought her next day,' said Wilderspin, 'and I sketched in the face of Pelagia as Isis at once. I had already taken out the face of the previous model that had dissatisfied me. I now took out the figure too, for the figure of this new model was as perfect as her face.'

'Go on, go on. What occurred?'

'Nothing, save that she stood dumb, like one who had no language save that of another world. But at the second sitting she had a fit of a most dreadful kind.'

'Ah! Tell me quickly,' I said. Her face became suddenly distorted by an expression of terror such as I had never seen and never imagined possible. I have caught it exactly in my picture ”Christabel.” She revived and tried to run out of the studio. Her mother and I seized her, and she then fell down insensible.'

'What occasioned the fit? What had frightened her?'

'That is what I am not quite certain about. When she entered the studio she fixed her eyes upon a portrait which I had been working upon; but that must have been merely a coincidence.'

'A portrait!' I cried. And Winifred's scared expression when she encountered my mother's look of hate in the churchyard came back to me like a scene witnessed in a flash of lightning. 'The portrait was my mother's?'

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