"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 ma.s.s 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s 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 pa.s.sed now into another torture-chamber. It was being torn between two warring, maddening forces--the pa.s.sionate 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-s.n.a.t.c.hers; 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.ddess 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 G.o.ddess 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 pa.s.sing."
"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 pa.s.sionate 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 pet.i.tion 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 d.i.c.kens 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 G.o.ddess 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 s.p.a.ce, 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.