Aylwin Part 54

'There's the same look now on your face as there was then, and I should know it among ten thousand.'

'Polly Onion,' I said, 'there is my address, and if ever you want a friend, and if you are in trouble, you will know where to find a.s.sistance,' and I gave her another sovereign.

'You're a good sort,' said she, 'and no mistake.'

'Good-bye,' I said, shaking her hand. 'See well after Mrs. Gudgeon.'

'All right,' said she, and a smile broke over her face. 'I think I ought to tell you now,' she continued, 'that Meg's no more ill of dropsy than I am; she could walk twenty miles off the reel; there ain't a bullock in England half as strong as Meg; she's shamming.'

'Shamming, but why?'

'Well, she ain't drunk; ever since the Beauty died she's never touched a drop o' gin. But she's turned quite cranky. She's got it into her head that the relations of the Beauty are going to send her to prison for kidnapping; and she thinks that every one that comes near her is a policeman in plain clothes. She's just lying in bed to keep herself out of the way till she starts.'

'Where's she going, then?'

'She talks about going to see after her son Bob in the country; her husband is a Welshman. He's over the water.'

'Did you say she had given up drinking?' I asked.

'Yes; she seemed to dote on the Beauty, and when the Beauty died she said, "My darter went wrong through me drinkin', and my son Bob went wrong through me drinkin'; and I feel somehow that it was through my drinkin' that I lost the Beauty; and never will you find me touch another drop o' gin, Poll. Beer I ain't fond on, and it 'ud take a rare swill o' beer to get up as far as Meg Gudgeon's head."'

'There ain't much fault to be found with a woman like Meg Gudgeon,'

said Sinfi. 'Was the Beauty fond o' her? She ought to ha' bin.'

'She used to call her Knocker,' said the girl. 'She seemed very fond of her when they were together, but seemed to forget her as soon as they were apart.'

Sinfi and I then left the house.

In Great Queen Street she took my hand as if to bid me good-bye. But she stood and gazed at me wistfully, and I gazed at her. At last she said,

'An' now, brother, we'll jist go across to Kingston Vale, an' see my daddy, an' set your livin'-waggin to rights.'

'Then, Sinfi,' I said, 'you and I are once more--'

I stopped and looked at her. The fearless young Amazon and seeress, who kept a large family of the Kaulo Camloes in awe, was supposed to have nearly conquered the feminine weakness of tears; but she had not. There was a c.h.i.n.k in the Amazon's armour, and I had found it.

'Yis,' said she, nodding her head and smiling. 'You an' me's right pals ag'in.'

As we were going I told her how I had replaced the jewel in the tomb.

'I know'd you would do it. Yis, I heer'd you telling the gravedigger the same thing.'

'And yet,' said I bitterly, 'in spite of that and in spite of the Golden Hand, she is dead.'

Sinfi stood silently looking at me now. Even her prodigious faith seemed conquered.

IV

For a few days I paced with Sinfi over Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park, The weather was now unusually brilliant for the time of year.

Sinfi would walk silently by my side.

But I could not rest with the Gypsies. I must be alone. Soon I left the camp and returned to London, where I took a suite of rooms in a house not far from Eaton Square--though to me London was a huge meaningless maze of houses cl.u.s.tered around Primrose Court--that horrid, fascinating, intolerable core of pain. Into my lungs poured the hateful atmosphere of the city where Winifred had perished; poured hot and stifling as sand-blasts of the desert. Impossible to stay there!--for the pavement seemed actually to scorch my feet, like the floor of a fiery furnace. To me the sun above was but the hideous eye of Circ.u.mstance which had stared down pitilessly on that bare head of hers, and blistered those feet.

The lamps at night seemed twinkling, blinking in a callous consciousness of my tragedy--my monstrous tragedy of real life, the like of which no poet dare imagine. But what aroused my wrath to an unbearable pitch--what determined me to leave London at once--was the sight of the unsympathetic faces in the streets. Though sympathy could have given me no comfort, the myriad unsympathetic eyes of London infuriated me.

'Died in beggar's rags--died in a hovel!' I muttered with rage as the equipages and coa.r.s.e splendours of the West End rolled insolently by.

'Died in a hovel!--and this London, this vast, ridiculous, swarming human ant-hill, whose millions of paltry humdrum lives were not worth one breath from those lips--this London spurned her, left her to perish alone in her squalor and misery.'

Cyril and Wilderspin had returned to the Continent. D'Arcy was still away.

I made application to the Home Secretary to have the pauper grave opened. On the ground that I was 'not a relative of the deceased,'

the officials refused to inst.i.tute even preliminary inquiries.

During this time no news of Mrs. Gudgeon had come to me through Polly Onion, and I determined to go to Primrose Court and see what had become of her.

When I reached Primrose Court I found that the shutters of the house were up. Knocking and getting no response, I ascertained from a pot-boy who was pa.s.sing the corner of the court that Mrs. Gudgeon had decamped. Neither the pot-boy nor any one in the court could tell me whither she was gone.

'But where is Polly Onion?' I asked anxiously; for I was beginning to blame myself bitterly for having neglected them.

'I can tell you where poor Polly is,' said the pot-boy. 'She's in the New North Cemetery. She fell downstairs and broke her neck.'

'Why, she lived downstairs,' I said.

'That's true; you seem to be well up in the family, sir. But Poll couldn't pay her rent, so old Meg took her in. And on the very morning when Meg and Poll were a-startin' off together into the country--it was quite early and dark--Poll stumbles over three young flower-gals as 'ad crep' in the front door in the night time and was makin' the stairs their bed. Gals as hadn't made enough to pay for their night's lodgin' often used to sleep on Meg's stairs. Poll was picked up as nigh dead as a toucher, and she died at the 'ospital.'

Toiling in the revolving cage of Circ.u.mstance, I strove in vain against that most appalling form of envy--the envy of one's fellow creatures that they should live and breathe while there is no breath of life for the _one_.

My uncle Cecil's death had made me a rich man; but what was wealth to me if it could not buy me respite from the vision haunting me day and night--the vision of the attic, the mattress, and the woman?

And as I thought of the powerlessness of wealth to give me one crumb of comfort, and remembered Winnie's sermon about wealth, I would look at myself in the mirror above my mantelpiece and smile bitterly at the sight of the hollow cheeks, furrowed brow, and melancholy eyes, and recall her words about her hovering near me after she was dead.

The thought of my wealth and the squalor in which she had died was, I think, the most maddening thought of all. I had now become the possessor of Wilderspin's picture 'Faith and Love,' having bought it of the Bond Street dealer to whom it belonged; and also of the 'Christabel' picture, and these I was constantly looking at as they hung up on the walls of my room. After a while, however, I destroyed the 'Christabel' picture, it was too painful. Though I would not see such friends as I had, I read their letters; indeed, it was these same letters which alone could draw from me a grim smile now and then.

Almost every letter ended by urging me, in order to flee from my sorrows, to travel! With the typical John Bull travelling seems to be always the panacea. In sorrow, John's herald of peace is Baedeker: the dispenser of John's true nepenthe is Mr. Murray. Pity and love for Winifred pursued me, tortured me nigh unto death, and therefore did these friends of mine seem to suppose that I wanted to flee from my pity and sorrow! Why, to flee from my sorrow, to get free of my pity, to flee from the agonies that went nigh to tearing soul from body, would have been to flee from all that I had left of life--memory.

Did I want to flee from Winnie? Why, memory was Winnie now; and did I want to flee from _her_? And yet it was memory that was goading me on to the verge of madness. No doubt the reader thinks me a weak creature for allowing the pa.s.sion of pity to sap my manhood in this fashion. But it was not so much her death as the manner of her death that withered my heart and darkened my soul. The calamities which fell upon her, grievous beyond measure, unparalleled, not to be thought of save with a pallor of cheek and a shudder of the flesh, were ever before me, mocking me--maddening me.

'Died in a hovel!' As I gave voice to this impeachment of Heaven, night after night, wandering up and down the streets, my brain was being scorched and withered by those same thoughts of anger against destiny and most awful revolt which had appalled me when first I saw how the curse of Heaven or the whim of Circ.u.mstance had been fulfilled.

Then came that pa.s.sionate yearning for death, which grief such as mine must needs bring. But if what Materialism teaches were true, suicide would rob me even of my memory of her. If, on the other hand, what I had been taught by the supernaturalism of my ancestors were true, to commit suicide might be but to play finally into the hands of that same unknown pitiless power with whom my love had all along been striving.

'Suicide might sever my soul from hers for ever.' I said, and then the tragedy would seem too monstrously unjust to be true, and I said: 'It cannot be--such things cannot be: it is a hideous dream. She is not dead! She is in Wales with friends at Carnarvon, and I shall awake and laugh at all this imaginary woe!'