Aylwin

by Theodore Watts-Dunton

XII

Weak in body and in mind as an infant, I woke again to consciousness. Through the open window the sunlight, with that tender golden-yellow tone which comes with morning in England, was pouring between the curtains, and illuminating the white counterpane. Then a soft breeze came and slightly moved the curtains, and sent the light and shadows about the bed and the opposite wall—a breeze laden with the scent I always associated with Wynne's cottage, the scent of geraniums. I raised myself on my elbows, and gazed over the geraniums on the window-sill at the blue sky, which was as free of clouds as though it were an Italian one, save that a little feathery cloud of a palish gold was slowly moving towards the west.

'It is shaped like a hand,' I said dreamily, and then came the picture of Winifred in the churchyard singing, and pointing to just such a golden cloud, and then came the picture of Tom Wynne reeling towards us from the church porch, and then came everything in connection with him and with her; everything down to the very last words which I had spoken about her to my mother before unconsciousness had come upon me. But what I did not know—what I was now burning to know without delay—was what time had passed since then.

I called out 'Mother!' A nurse, who was sitting in the room, but hidden from me by a large carved and corniced oak wardrobe, sprang up and told me that she would go and fetch my mother.

'Mother,' I said, when she entered the room, 'you've been?'

'Yes,' said she, taking a seat by my bedside, and motioning the nurse to leave us.

'And you were in time, mother!'

'More than in time,' said she. 'There was nothing to do. I have realised, however, that your extraordinary and horrible story was true. It was not a fever-dream. The tomb has been desecrated.'

'But, mother, you went as you promised to the sands in Church Cove, and you waited for the ebb of the tide?'

'I did.'

'And you found—'

'Nothing; no corpse exposed.'

'And you went again the next day?'

'I did.'

'And you found—'

'Nothing.'

'But how many days have passed, mother? How many days have I been lying here?'

'Seven.'

'And no sign of—of the body was to be seen?'

'None. The wretch must have been buried for ever beneath the great mass of the fallen cliff. I went no more.'

'Oh, mother, you should have gone every day. Think of the frightful risk, mother. On the very day after you ceased your visits the body might have been turned up by the tide, and she might have gone and seen it.'

The picture was too terrible. I fell back exhausted. I revived, however, in a somewhat calmer mood. When my mother came into the room again, I returned at once to the subject. I reproached her bitterly for not having gone every day. She listened to my reproaches in entire calmness.

'It was idle to keep repeating these visits every day,' said she, 'and I consider that I have fully performed my part of the compact. I expect you to fulfil yours.'

I remained silent, preparing for a deadly struggle with the only being on earth I had ever really feared.

'I have fully kept my word, Henry,' said she, 'and have done for you more than my duty to your father's memory warranted me in doing.'

'But, mother, you did not do all that you promised to do; you did not prevent all risk of Winifred's finding it. She may find it even yet.'

'That is not likely now. I have performed my part of the compact, and
I expect you to perform yours.'

'You did not use all means to save my Winifred from worse than death—from madness; you did not use all means to save me from dying of self-murder or of a broken heart; and the compact is broken. Whether or not I could have kept my faith with you by breaking troth with her, it is you who have set me free. Mother,' I said, fiercely, 'in such a compact it must be the letter of the bond.'

'Mean subterfuge, unworthy of your descent,' said my mother quietly, but with one of those looks of hers that used to frighten me once.

'No, no, mother; you have not kept the letter of the bond, and I am free. You did not take the fullest and best means to save Winifred. Your compact was to save her from the risk I told you of. And, mother, mother, listen to me!' I cried, in a state of crazy excitement now: 'in the darkest moment of my life, when I was prostrate and helpless, you were pitiless as Pride. Listen, mother: Winifred Wynne shall be mine. Not all the Aylwins that have ever eaten of wheat and fattened the worms shall prevent that. She shall be mine. I say, she shall be mine!'

'The daughter of the man who desecrated my husband's tomb!'

'And my father's! That man's daughter shall be my wife,' I said, sitting up in bed and looking into those eyes, bright and proud, which had been wont to make all other eyes blink and quail.

'Cursed by your father, and cursed by God—'

'That curse—for what it may be worth—I take upon my own head; the curse shall be mine. Even if I believed the threat about the "desolate places," I would be there; if bare-footed she had to beg from door to door, rest assured, mother, that an Aylwin would hold the wallet—would leave the whole Aylwin brood, their rank, their money, and their stupid, vulgar British pride, to walk beside the beggar.'

The look on my mother's face would have terrified most people. It would have terrified me once, but in the frenzy into which I had then passed, nothing would have made me quail.

'Your services, mother, are no longer needed,' I said. 'Wynne's corpse might have been washed up by the tide, and your compact was to be there to see; but now, most likely, it is hidden, not under the loose fragments as I had feared, but under the great mass of earth,—hidden for ever.'

'But you forget,' said my mother, 'that the amulet has to be recovered.'

'Mother,' I said, in the state of wild suspiciousness concerning her and her motives into which I had now passed, 'I know what your words imply,—that Winifred is not yet out of danger; the evidence of the curse and the crime can be dug up.'

'I have no wish to harm the girl, Henry. You mistake me.'

'Then, mother, we must not mistake each other in this matter,' I said. 'You have alluded to the word of an Aylwin. With me, as with the best of us, the word of an Aylwin is an oath. Wynne's corpse is now hidden; the cross is now hidden; I give you the word of an Aylwin that the man who digs up that corpse I will kill. I will not consider that he is an irresponsible agent of yours; I will kill him, and his blood shall be upon the head of her who sends him, knowing, to his death.'

'And be hanged,' said my mother.

'Perhaps. But after her father's crime has been exposed, the first thing for me is—to kill!'

'Why, boy, there's murder in your eyes!' said my mother, taken off her guard.

'Oh, mother, mother, can you not see that no wolf with a stolen lamb in its mouth was ever more pitilessly shot down by the owner of that lamb than any hireling wolf of yours would be shot down by me?'

'Boy, are you quite demented?'

'Listen, mother. To prevent Winifred from knowing that her father had stolen that amulet, and so brought down upon her the curse, I would have drowned her with myself in the tide. We sat waiting for the tide to drown us, when the settlement came at the last moment and buried it away from her. Is it likely that I should hesitate to kill a clodhopper, or a score, if only to take my vengeance on you and Fate? The homicide now will be yours.'

She left, giving me a glance of defiance; but before our eyes ended that conflict, I saw which of us had conquered.

'Hate is strong,' I murmured, as I sank down on my pillow, 'and destiny is strong; but oh, Winnie, Winnie—stronger than hate, and stronger than destiny and death, is love. She knows, Winnie, that the life of the man who should dig up that corpse would not be worth an hour's purchase; she knows, Winnie, that in the court of conscience she alone is answerable now for what may befall; and you are safe! But poor mother! My poor dear mother, whom once I loved so dearly, was it indeed you I struggled with just now? Mother, mother, was it you?'

This interview retarded my recovery, and I had a serious relapse.

The fever was a severe one. The symptoms were aggravated by these most painful and trying interviews with my mother, and by my increasing anxiety about the fate of Winifred. Yet my vigorous constitution began to show signs of conquering. Of Winifred I could learn nothing, save what could be gleaned from the servants in attendance, who seemed merely to have heard that Tom Wynne was missing, that he had probably fallen drunk over the cliff and been washed out to sea, and that his daughter was seeking him everywhere. As the days passed by, however, and no hint reached me that the corpse had been found on the sands, I concluded that, when the larger mass finally settled on the night of the landslip, the corpse had fallen immediately beneath it, and was buried under the main mass. Yet, from what I had seen of the corpse's position, in the rapid view I had of it, perched on the upright mass of sward, I did not understand how this could be.

And so anxiety after anxiety delayed my progress. Still, on the whole, I felt that the body would not now be dislodged by the tides, and that Winifred would at least be spared a misery compared with which even her uncertainty about her father's fate would be bearable. But how I longed to be up and with her!

Dr. Mivart, who attended me, a young medical man of much ability who had finished his medical education in Paris, and had lately settled at Raxton, came every day with great punctuality.

One day, however, he arrived three hours behind his usual time, and seemed to think that some explanation was necessary.

'I must apologise,' said he, 'for my unpunctuality to-day, but the fact is that, at the very moment of starting, I was delayed by one of the most interesting—one of the most extraordinary cases that ever came within my experience, even at the Salpêtrière Hospital, where we were familiar with the most marvellous cases of hysteria—a seizure brought on by terror in which the subject's countenance mimics the appearance of the terrible object that has caused it. A truly wonderful case! I have just written to Marini about it.'

He seemed so much interested in his case, that he aroused a certain interest in me, though at that time the word 'hysteria' conveyed an impression to me of a very uncertain and misty kind.

'Where did it occur?' I asked.

'Here, in your own town,' said Mivart. 'A most extraordinary case. My report will delight Marini, our great authority, as you no doubt are aware, on catalepsy and cataleptic ecstasy.'

'Strange that I have heard nothing of it!' I said.

'Oh!' replied Mivart, 'it occurred only this morning. Some fishermen passing below the old church were attracted, first by a shriek of a peculiarly frightful and unearthly kind, and then by some unusual appearance on the sands, at the spot where the last landslip took place.'

My pulses stopped in a moment, and I clung to the back of my chair.

'What—did—the fishermen see?' I gasped.

'The men landed,' continued Mivart,—too much interested in the case to observe my emotion,—'and there they found a dead body—the body of the missing organist here, who had apparently fallen with the landslip. The face was horribly distorted by terror, the skull shattered, and around the neck was slung a valuable cross made of precious stones. But the most interesting feature of the case is this, that in front of the body, in a fit of a remarkable kind, squatted his daughter—you may have seen her, an exceedingly pretty girl lately come from Wales or somewhere—and on her face was reflected and mimicked, in the most astonishing way, the horrible expression on the face of the corpse, while the fingers of her right hand were so closely locked around the cross—'

I felt that from my mouth there issued a voice not mine—a long smothered shriek like that which had seemed to issue from my mouth on that awful night when, looking out of the window, I had heard the noise of the landslip. Then I felt myself whispering 'The Curse!' Then I knew no more.

XIII

I had another dangerous relapse, and was delirious for two days, I think. When I came to myself, the first words I uttered to Mivart, whom I found with me, were inquiries about Winifred. He was loth at first to revive the subject, though he supposed that the effect of his narrative upon me had arisen partly from my weakness and partly from what he called his 'sensational way' of telling the story. (My mother had been very careful to drop no hint of the true state of the case.) At last, however, Mivart told me all he knew about Winifred, while I hid my face in my pillow and listened.

'In the seizures (which are recurrent) the girl,' he said, 'mimics the expression of terror on her father's face. Between the paroxysms she lapses into a strange kind of dementia. It is as though her own mind had fled and the body had been entered by the soul of a child. She will then sing snatches of songs, sometimes in Welsh and sometimes in English, but with the strange, weird intonation of a person in a dream. I have known something like this to take place before, but it has been in seizures of an epileptic kind, very unlike this case in their general characteristics. The mental processes seem to have been completely arrested by the shock, as the wheels of a watch or a musical box are stopped if it falls.'

He could tell me nothing about her, he said, nor what had become of her since she had left his hands.

'The parish officer is taking his holiday,' he added. 'I mean to inquire about her. I wish I could take her to Paris to the Salpêtrière, where Marini is treating such cases by transmitting through magnetism the patient's seizure to a healthy subject.'

'Will she recover?'

'Without the Salpêtrière treatment?'

'Will she recover?' I asked, maddened beyond endurance by all this cold-blooded professional enthusiasm about a case which was simply a case of life and death to Winnie and me.

'She may, unless the seizures become too frequent for the strength of the constitution. In that event, of course, she would succumb. She is entirely harmless, let me tell you.'

He told me that she was at the cottage, where some good soul was seeing after her.

'I'll get up,' I said, trying to rise.

'Get up!' said the doctor, astonished; 'why do you want to get up?
You are not strong enough to sit in a chair yet.'

This was, alas! but too true, and my great object now was to conceal my weakness; for I determined to get out as soon as my legs could carry me, though I should drop down dead on the road.

I gathered from the doctor and the servants that the sacrilege had now become publicly known, and had caused much excitement. Wynne had evidently been slightly intoxicated when he committed it, and had taken no care to conceal the proofs that the grave had been tampered with. At the inquest the amulet had been identified and claimed by my mother.

It was some days before I got out, and then I went at once to the cottage. It was a lovely evening as I walked down Wilderness Road. It was not till I reached the little garden-gate that I began fully to feel how weak my illness had left me. The gate was half open, and I looked over into the garden, which was already forlorn and deserted. Some instinct told me she was not there. The little flower-beds looked shaggy, grass-grown, and uncared for. In the centre, among the geraniums, phlox-beds, and French marigolds, sat a dirty-white hen, clucking and calling a brood of dirty-white chickens. The box-bordered gravelled paths, which Wynne, in spite of his drunkenness, used to keep always so neat, were covered with leaves, shaken by the wind from the trees surrounding the garden. One of the dark green shutters was unfastened, and stood out at right-angles from the wall—a token of desertion. On the diamond panes of the upper windows, round which the long tendrils of grape-vines were drooping, the gorgeous sunset was reflected, making the glass gleam as though a hundred little fires were playing behind it. When I reached the door, the paint of which seemed far more cracked with the sun than it had looked a few weeks before, I found on knocking that the cottage was empty. I did not linger, but went at once into the town to inquire about her.

In place of giving me the information I was panting for, the whole town came cackling round me with comments on the organist and the sacrilege. I turned into the 'Fishing Smack' inn, a likely place to get what news was to be had, and found the asthmatical old landlord haranguing some fishermen who were drinking their ale on a settle.

'It's my b'lief,' said the old man, 'that Tom was arter somethink else besides that air jewelled cross. I'm eighty-five year old come next Dullingham fair, and I regleck as well as if it wur yisterdy when resur-rectionin' o' carpuses wur carried on in the old churchyard jes' like one o'clock, and the carpuses sent up to Lunnon reg'lar, and it's my 'pinion as that wur part o' Tom's game, dang 'im; and if I'd a 'ad my way arter the crouner's quest, he'd never a' bin buried in the very churchyard as he went and blast-phemed.'

'Where would you 'a buried 'im, then, Muster Lantoff?' asked a fisher-boy in a blue worsted jerkin.

'Buried 'im? why, at the cross-ruds, with a hedge-stake through his guts, to be sure. If there's a penny agin' 'im on that air slate' (pointing to a slate hung up on the door) 'there must be ten shillins, dang 'im.'

'You blear-eyed, ignorant old donkey,' I cried, coming suddenly upon him, 'what do you suppose he could have done with a dead body in these days? Here's your wretched ten shillings,—for which you'd sell all the corpses in Raxton churchyard.'

And I gave him half-a-sovereign, feeling, somehow, that I was doing honour to Winifred.

'Thankee for the money, Mister Hal, anyhow,' said the old creature. 'You was allus a liberal 'un, you was. But as to what Tom could 'a dun with the carpus, I'm allus heer'd that you may dew anythink with any-think, if you on'y send it carriage-paid to Lunnon,'

I left the house in anger and disgust. No tidings could I get of
Winifred in Raxton or Graylingham.

By this time I was thoroughly worn out, and obliged to go home. My anxiety had become nearly insupportable. All night I walked up and down my bedroom, like a caged animal, cursing Superstition, cursing Convention, and all the other follies that had combined to destroy her. It was not till the next day that the true state of the case was made known to me in the following manner: At the end of the town lived the widow of Shales, the tailor. Winifred and I had often, in our childish days, stood and watched old Shales, sitting cross-legged on a board in the window, at his work, when Winifred would whisper to me, 'How nice it must be to be a tailor!'

As I passed this shop I now saw that on the same board was sitting a person in whom Winifred had taken still stronger interest. This was a diminutive imitation of the deceased, in the person of his hump-backed son, a little man of about twenty-four, who might, as far as appearance went, have been any age from twenty to eighty, with a pale anxious face like his mother's. He was stitching at a coat with, apparently, the same pair of scissors by his side that used to delight us two children. Standing by the side of the board, and looking on with a skilled intelligence shining from her pale eyes, was Mrs. Shales, with an infant in her arms—a wasted little grandchild wrapt in a plaid shawl, apparently smoking a chibouque, but in reality sucking vigorously at the mouthpiece of a baby's bottle, which it was clasping deftly with its pink little fingers.

Mrs. Shales beckoned me mysteriously into her shop, and then into the little parlour behind it, where she used to sit and watch the customers through the green muslin blind of the glass door, like a spider in its web. Young Shales, who left his board, followed us, and they then gave me some news that at once decided my course of action. They told me that one morning, after her frightful shock, Winifred had encountered Shales, who was taking, a holiday, and employing it in catching young crabs among the stones. Winifred, who had a great liking for the hump-backed tailor, had come up to him and talked in a dazed way. Shales, pitying her condition, had induced her to go home with him; and then it had occurred to him to go and inquire at the Hall what suggestion could be made concerning her at a house where her father had been so well known. He could not see me; I was ill in bed. He saw my mother, who at once suggested that Winifred should be taken to Wales, to an aunt with whom, according to Wynne, she had been living. (No one but myself knew anything of Wynne's affairs, and my mother, though she had heard of the aunt, had not, as I then believed, heard of her death.) She proposed that Shales himself should contrive to take Winifred to Wales. 'She had reasons,' she said, 'for wishing that Winifred should not be handed over to the local parish officer.' She offered to pay Shales liberally for going. I, however, was to know nothing of this. Her object, of course, was to get Winifred out of my way. The aunt's address was furnished by a Mr. Lacon of Dullingham, an old friend of Wynne's, who also, it seems, was ignorant of the aunt's death. This aunt, a sister of Winifred's mother, named Davies, the widow of a sea captain who had once known better days, resided in an old cottage between Bettws y Coed and Capel Curig. Shales had found no difficulty in persuading Winifred to go with him, for she had now sunk into a condition of dazed stupor, and was very docile.

They started on their long journey across England by rail, and everything went well till they got into Wales, when Winifred's stupor seemed to be broken into by the familiar scenery; her wits became alive again. Then an idea seemed to seize her that she was pursued by me, as the messenger bearing my dead father's curse. The appearance of any young man bearing the remotest resemblance to me frightened her. At last, before they reached Bettws y Coed, she had escaped, and was lost among the woods. Shales had made every effort to find her, but without avail, and was compelled at last, by the demands of his business, to give up the quest. He had returned on the previous evening, and my mother had enjoined him not to tell me what had been done, though she seemed much distressed at hearing that Winnie was lost, and was about to send others into Wales in order to find her, if possible. Shales, however, had determined to tell me, as the matter, he said, lay upon his conscience.

On getting this news I went straight home, ordered a portmanteau to be packed, and placed in it all my ready cash. Before starting I sat down to write a letter to my uncle. On hearing of my movements, my mother came to me in great agitation. In her eyes there was that haggard expression which I thought I understood. Already she had begun to feel that she and she alone was responsible for whatsoever calamities might fall upon the helpless deserted girl she had sent away. Already she had begun to feel the pangs of that remorse which afterwards stung her so cruelly that not all Winnie's woes, nor all mine, were so dire as hers. There are some natures that feel themselves responsible for all the unforeseen, as well as for all the foreseen, consequences of their acts. My mother was one of these. I rose as she entered, offered her a seat, and then sat down again.

She inquired whither I was going.

'To North Wales,' I said.

She stood aghast. But she now understood that grief had made me a man.

'You are going,' said she, 'after the daughter of the scoundrel who desecrated your father's tomb?'

'I am going after the young lady whom I intend to marry.'

'Wynne's daughter marry my only son! Never!'

I proceeded with my letter.

'I will write to your uncle Aylwin at once. I will tell him you are going to marry that miscreant's daughter, and he will disinherit you.'

'In that case, mother,' I said, rising from the table, 'I need not trouble myself to finish my letter; for I was writing to him, telling him the same thing. Still, perhaps I had better send mine too,' I continued. 'I should like at least to remain on friendly terms with him, he is so good to me'; and I resumed my seat at the writing-table.

'Henry,' said my mother, after a second or two, 'I think you had better not write to your uncle; it might only make matters worse. You had better leave it to me.'

'Thank you, mother, the letter is finished,' I replied as I sealed it up, 'and will be sent. Good-bye, dear,' I said, taking her hand and kissing it. 'You knew not what you did, and I know you did it for the best.'

'When do you return, Henry?' asked she, in a conquered and sad tone, that caused me many a pang to remember afterwards.

'That is altogether uncertain,' I answered. 'I go to follow Winifred. If I find her alive I shall marry her, if she will marry me, unless permanent insanity prove a barrier. If she is dead'—(I restrained myself from saying aloud what I said to myself)—'I shall still follow her.'

'The daughter of the scoundrel!' she murmured, her lips grey with suppressed passion.

'Mother,' I said, 'let us not part in anger. The sword of Fate is between us. When I was at school I made a certain vow. The vow was that I would woo and win but one woman upon earth—the daughter of the man who has since violated my father's tomb. I have lately made a second vow, that, until she is found, I shall devote my life to the quest of Winifred Wynne. If you think that I am likely to be deterred by fears of being disinherited by your family, open and read my letter to my uncle. I have there told him whom I intend to marry.'

'Mad, mad boy!' said my mother. 'Society will—'

'You have once or twice before mentioned society, mother. If I find Winifred Wynne, I shall assuredly marry her, unless prevented by the one obstacle I have mentioned. If I marry her I shall, if it so please me and her, take her into society.'

'Into society!' she replied, with ineffable scorn.

'And I shall say to society, "Here is my wife.'"

'And when society asks, "Who is your wife?'"

'I shall reply, "She is the daughter of the drunken organist who desecrated my father's tomb, though that concerns you not:—her own speciality, as you see, is that she is the flower of all girlhood."'

'And when society rejects this earthly paragon?'

'Then I shall reject society.'

'Reject society, boy!' said my mother. 'Why, Cyril Aylwin himself, the bohemian painter who has done his best to cheapen and vulgarise our name, is not a more reckless, lawless leveller than you. And, good heavens! to him, and perhaps afterwards to you, will come—the coronet.'

And she left the room.

III

WINIFRED'S DUKKERIPEN

I

I need not describe my journey to North Wales. On reaching Bettws y Coed I turned into the hotel there—'The Royal Oak'—famished; for, as fast as trains could carry me, I had travelled right across England, leaving rest and meals to chance. I found the hotel full of English painters, whom the fine summer had attracted thither as usual. The landlord got me a bed in the village. A six-o'clock table d'hôte was going on when I arrived, and I joined it. Save myself, the guests were, I think, landscape painters to a man. They had been sketching in the neighbourhood. I thought I had never met so genial and good-natured a set of men, and I have since often wondered what they thought of me, who met such courteous and friendly advances as they made towards me in a temper that must have seemed to them morose or churlish and stupid. Before the dinner was over another tourist entered—a fresh-complexioned young Englishman in spectacles, who, sitting next to me, did at length, by force of sheer good-humour, contrive to get into a desultory kind of conversation with me, and, as far as I remember, he talked well. He was not an artist, I found, but an amateur geologist and antiquary. His hobby was not like that fatal antiquarianism of my father's, which had worked so much mischief, but the harmless quest of flint implements. His talk about his collection of flints, however, sent my mind off to Flinty Point and the never-to-be-forgotten flint-built walls of Raxton church. After dinner, coffee, liquors, and tobacco being introduced into the dining-room, I got up, intending to roam about outside the hotel till bedtime; but the rain, I found, was falling in torrents. I was compelled to return to my friend of the 'flints.' At that moment one of the artists plunged into a comic song, and by the ecstatic look of the company I knew that a purgatorial time was before me. I resigned myself to my fate. Song followed song, until at last even my friend of the flints struck up the ballad of Little Billee, whose lugubrious refrain seemed to 'set the table in a roar'; but to me it will always be associated with sickening heartache.

As soon as the rain ceased I left the hotel and went to the room in the little town the landlord had engaged for me. There, with the roar in my ears of the mountain streams (swollen by the rains), I went to bed and, strange to say, slept.

Next morning I rose early, breakfasted at 'The Royal Oak' as soon as I could get attended to, and proceeded in the direction in which, according to what I had gathered from various sources, Mrs. Davies had lived. This led me through a valley and by the side of a stream, whose cascades I succeeded, after many efforts, in crossing. After a while, however, I found that I had taken a wrong track, and was soon walking in the contrary direction. I will not describe that long dreary walk in a drenching rain, with nothing but the base of the mountain visible, all else being lost in clouds and mist.

After blundering through marshy and boggy hillocks for miles, I found myself at last in the locality indicated to me. Arriving at a roadside public-house, I entered it, and on inquiry was vexed to find that I had again been misdirected. I slept there, and in the morning started again on my quest. I was now a long way off my destination, but had at least the satisfaction of knowing that I was on the right road at last. In the afternoon I reached another wayside inn, very similar to that in which I had slept. I walked up at once to the landlord (a fat little Englishman who looked like a Welshman, with black eyes and a head of hair like a black door-mat), and asked him if he had known Mrs. Davies. He said he had, but seemed anxious to assure me that he was a Chester man and 'not a Taffy.' She had died, he told me, not long since. But he had known more of her niece, Winifred Wynne (or, as most people called her, Winifred Davies); for, said he, 'she was a queer kind of outdoor creature that everybody knew.—as fond of the rain and mist as sensible folk are fond of sunshine.'

'Where did she live?' I inquired.

'You must have passed the very door,' said the man. And then he indicated a pretty little cottage by the roadside which I had passed, not far from the lake. Mrs. Davies (he told me) had lived there with her niece till the aunt died.

'Then you knew Winifred Wynne?' I said. There was to me a romantic kind of interest about a man who had seen Winifred in Wales.

'Knew her well,' said he. 'She was a Carnarvon gal—tremenjus fond o' the sea—and a rare pretty gal she was.'

'Pretty gal she is, you might ha' said, Mr. Blyth,' a woman's voice exclaimed from the settle beneath the window. 'She's about in these parts at this very moment, though Jim Burton there says it's her ghose. But do ghoses eat and drink? that's what I want to know. Besides, if anybody's like to know the difference between Winnie Wynne and Winnie Wynne's ghose, I should say it's most likely me.'

I turned round. A Gypsy girl, dressed in fine Gypsy costume, very dark but very handsome, was sitting on a settle drinking from a pot of ale, and nursing an instrument of the violin kind, which she was fondling as though it were a baby. She was quite young, not above eighteen years of age, slender, graceful—remarkably so, even for a Gypsy girl. Her hair, which was not so much coal-black as blue-black, was plaited in the old-fashioned Gypsy way, in little plaits that looked almost as close as plaited straw, and as it was of an unusually soft and fine texture for a Gypsy, the plaits gave it a lustre quite unlike that which unguents can give. As she sat there, one leg thrown over the over, displaying a foot which, even in the heavy nailed boots, would have put to shame the finest foot of the finest English lady I have ever seen, I could discern that she was powerful and tall; her bosom, gently rising and falling beneath the layers of scarlet and yellow and blue handkerchiefs, which filled up the space the loose-fitting gown of bright merino left open, was of a breadth fully worthy of her height. A silk handkerchief of deep blood-red colour was bound round her head, not in the modern Gypsy fashion, but more like an Oriental turban. From each ear was suspended a massive ring of red gold. Round her beautiful, towering, tanned neck was a thrice-twisted necklace of half-sovereigns and amber and red coral. She looked me full in the face. Then came a something in the girl's eyes the like of which I had seen in no other Gypsy's eyes, though I had known well the Gypsies who used to camp near Rington Manor, not far from Raxton, for my kinsman Percy Aylwin, the poet, had lately fallen in love with Winnie's early friend, Rhona Boswell. It was not exactly an 'uncanny' expression, yet it suggested a world quite other than this. It was an expression such as one might expect to see in a 'budding spae-wife,' or in a Roman Sibyl. And whose expression was it that it now reminded me of? But the remarkable thing was that this expression was intermittent; it came and went like the shadows the fleeting clouds cast along the sunlit grass. Then it was followed by a look of steady self-reliance and daring. This last variation of expression was what now suddenly came into her eyes as she said, scrutinising me from head to foot:

'Reia, you make a good git-up for a Romany-chal. Can you rokkra Romanes? No, I see you can't. I should ha' took you for the right sort. I should ha' begun the Romany rokkerpen with you, only you ain't got the Romany glime in your eyes. It's a pity he ain't got the Romany glime, ain't it, Jim?'

She turned to a young Gypsy fellow who was sitting at the other end of the settle, drinking also from a pot of ale, and smoking a cutty pipe.

'Don't ax me about no mumply Gorgio's eyes,' muttered the man, striking the leather legging of his right leg with a silver-headed whip he carried. 'You're allus a-takin' intrust in the Gorgios, and yet you're allus a-makin' believe as you hate 'em.'

'You say Winifred Wynne is back again?' I cried in an eager voice.

'That's jist what I did say, and I ain't deaf, my rei. How she managed to get back here puzzles me, poor thing, for she's jist for all the world like Rhona's daddy's daddy, Opi Bozzell, what buried his wits in his dead wife's coffin. She's even skeared at me.'

'Why, you don't mean to say Winnie's back!' cried the landlord. 'To think that I shouldn't have heard about Winnie Wynne bein' back. When did you see her, Sinfi?'

'I see her fust ever so many nights ago. I was comin' down this road, when what do I see but a gal a-kicking at the door of Mrs. Davies's emp'y house, and a-sobbin' she was jist fit to break her heart, and I sez to myself, as I looked at her—"Now, if it was possible for that 'ere gal to be Winifred Wynne, she'd be Winifred Wynne, but as it ain't possible for her to be Winifred Wynne, it ain't Winifred Wynne, and any mumply Gorgie [Footnote] as ain't Winifred Wynne may kick and sob for a blue moon for all me."'

[Footnote: Gorgio, a man who is not a Gypsy. Gorgie, a woman who is not a Gypsy.]

'But it was Winnie Wynne, I s'pose?' said the landlord, in a state now of great curiosity.

'It was Winnie Wynne,' replied the Gypsy, handing her companion her empty beer-pot, and pointing to the landlord as a sign that the man was to pass it on to him to be refilled. 'Up I goes to her, and I says, "Why, sister, who's bin a-meddlin' with you? I'll tear the windpipe out o' anybody wot's been a-meddlin' with you."'

When the girl used the word 'sister' a light broke in upon me.

'Are you Sinfi Lovell?' I cried.

'That jist my name, my rei; but as I said afore, I ain't deaf. Jist let Jim pass my beer across and don't interrup' me, please.'

'Don't rile her, sir,' whispered the landlord to me; 'she's got the real witch's eye, and can do you a mischief in a twink, if she likes. She's a good sort, though, for all that.'

'What are you two a-whisperin' about me?' said the girl in a menacing tone that seemed to alarm the landlord.

'I was only tellin' the gentleman not to rile you, because you was a fightin' woman,' said the man.

The Gypsy looked appeased and even gratified at the landlord's explanation.

'But what did Winnie Wynne do then, Sinfi?' asked the landlord.

'She turns round sharp,' said the Gypsy; 'she looks at me as skeared as the eyes of a hotchiwitchi [Footnote] as knows he's a-bein' uncurled for the knife. "Father!" she cries, and away she bolts like a greyhound; and I know'd at oust as she wur under a cuss. Now, you see, Mr. Blyth, that upset me, that did, for Winnie Wynne was the only one on 'em, Gorgio or Gorgie, ever I liked. No offence, Mr. Blyth, it isn't your fault you was born one; but,' continued the girl, holding up the foaming tankard and admiring the froth as it dropped from the rim upon her slender brown hand on its way to the floor, 'Winnie Wynne was the only one on 'em, Gorgio or Gorgie, ever I liked, and that upset me, that did, to see that 'ere beautiful cretur a-grinnin' and jabberin' under a cuss. The Romanies is gittin' too fond by half o' the Gorgios, and will soon be jist like mumply Gorgios themselves, speckable and silly; but Gorgio or Gorgie, she was the only one on 'em ever I liked, was Winnie Wynne; and when she turned round on me like that, with them kind eyes o' hern (such kind eyes I never seed afore) lookin' like that at me (and I know'd she was under a cuss)—I tell you,' she said, still addressing the beer, 'that it's made me fret ever since—that's what it's done!'

[Footnote: Hedgehog.]

About the truth of this last statement there could be no doubt, for her face was twitching violently in her efforts to keep down her emotion.

'And did you follow her?' said the landlord.

'Not I; what was the good?'

'But what did you do, Sinfi?'

'What did I do? Well, don't you mind me comin' here one night and buyin' a couple of blankets off you, and some bread and meat and things?'

'In course I do, Sinfi, and you said you wanted them for the vans.'

The Gypsy smiled and said, 'I knowed she was bound to come back, so I pulls up the window and in I gets, and then opens the door and off I comes to you, as bein' the nearest neighbour, for the blankets and things, and I puts 'em in the house, and I leaves the door uncatched, and I hides myself behind the house, and, sure enough, back she comes, poor thing! I hears her kick, kick, kickin' at the door, and then I hears her go in when she finds it give way. So I waits a good while, till I thinks she's eat some o' the vittles and gone to sleep maybe, and then round the house I creeps, and in the door I peeps, and soon I hears her breathin' soft, and then I shuts the door and goes away to the place.' [Footnote]

[Footnote: Camping-place.]

'But why didn't you tell us all this, Sinfi?' asked the landlord. 'My wife would ha' went and seen arter her, and we wouldn't ha' touched a farthin' for they blankets and things, not we, Sinfi, not we.'

'Ah, you would, though,' said the girl, ''cause I'd ha' made you take it. Winnie Wynne was the only one on 'em, Gorgio or Gorgie, ever I liked, and nobody's got no right to see arter her only me, and that's why I'm about here now, if you must know; but nobody's got no right to see arter her only me, and nobody sha'n't nuther. They might go and skear her to run up the hills, and she might dash herself all to flactions in no time.'

'Don't take on so, Sinfi,' said the landlord. 'When they are in that way they allus turns agin them as they was fond on.'

'Then you noticed as she was fond o' me, Mr. Blyth,' said the girl with great earnestness.

'Of course she was fond on you, Sinfi; everybody knows that.'

'Yes,' said the girl, now much affected, 'every body knowed it, every body knowed as she was fond o' me. And to see her look at me like that—it was a cruel sight, Mr. Blyth, I can tell you. Such a look you never see'd in all your life, Mr. Blyth.'

'Then I take it she's in the house now?' said the landlord.

'She goes prowlin' about all day among the hills, as if she was a-lookin' for somebody; and she talks to somebody as she calls the Tywysog o'r Niwl, an' I know that's Welsh for the "Prince o' the Mist"; but back she comes at night. She talks to herself a good deal; and she sings to herself the Welsh gillies what Mrs. Davies larnt her in a v'ice as seems as if she wur a-singin' in her sleep, but it's very sweet to hear it. Yesterday I crep' near her when she was a-sittin' down lookin' at herself in that 'ere llyn where the water's so clear, "Knockers' Llyn," as they calls it, where her and me and Rhona Boswell used to go. And I heard her say she was "cussed by Henry's feyther." And then I heard her talk to somebody agin, as she called the Prince of the Mist; but it's herself as she's a-talkin' to all the while.'

'Cursed by Henry's father! What curse could any superstitious mystic call down upon the head of Winifred? The heaven that would answer a call of that kind would be a heaven for zanies and tomfools!' I shouted, in a paroxysm of rage against the entire besotted human race. 'That for the curse!' I cried, snapping my fingers. 'I am Henry, and I am come to share the curse, if there is one.'

'Young man,' interposed the landlord, 'such blas-pheémous langige as that must not be spoke here; I ain't a-goin' to have my good beer turned to vinegar by blasphemin' them as owns the thunder, I can tell you.'

But the effect of my words upon the Gypsy was that of a spark in a powder-mine.

'Henry?' she said, 'Henry? are you the fine rei as she used to talk about? Are you the fine cripple as she was so fond on? Yes, Beng te tassa mandi if you ain't Henry his very self.'

'Don't,' remonstrated the landlord, 'don't meddle with the gentleman,
Sinfi. He ain't a cripple, as you can see.'

'Well, cripple or no cripple, he's Henry. I half thought it as soon as he began askin' about her. Now, my fine Gorgio, what do you and your fine feyther mean by cussin' Winnie Wynne? You've jist about broke her heart among ye. If you want to cuss you'd better cuss me;' and she sprang up in an attitude that showed me at once that she was a skilled boxer.

The male Gypsy rose and buttoned his coat over his waistcoat. I thought he was going to attack me. Instead of this, he said to the landlord:

'She's in for a set-to agin. She's sure to quarrel with me if I interferes, so I'll just go on to the place and not spile sport. Don't let her kill the chap, though, Mr. Blyth, if you can anyways help it. Anyhows, I ain't a-goin' to be called in for witness.'

With that he left the house.

The Gypsy girl looked at me from head to foot, and exclaimed,

'Lucky for you, my fine fellow, that I'm a duke's chavi, an' mustn't fight, else I'd pretty soon ask you outside and settle this off in no time. But you'd better keep clear of Mrs. Davies's cottage, I can tell you. Every stick in that house is mine.'

And, forgetting in her rage to pay her score, she picked up her strange-looking musical instrument, put it into a bag, and stalked out.

'She's got a queer temper of her own,' said the landlord; 'but she ain't a bad sort for all that. She's clever, too: she's the only woman in Wales, they say, as can play on the crwth now since Mrs. Davies is dead, what larnt her to do it.'

'The crwth?'

'The old ancient Welsh fiddle what can draw the Sperrits o' Snowdon when it's played by a vargin. I dessay you've often heard the sayin' "The sperrits follow the crwth." She makes a sight o' money by playin' on that fiddle in the houses o' the gentlefolk, and she's as proud as the very deuce. Ain't a bad sort, though, for all that.'

II

That I determined to cultivate the acquaintance of Sinfi Lovell I need scarcely say. But my first purpose was to see the cottage. The landlord showed me the way to it. He warned me that a storm was coming on, but I did not let that stay me. Masses of dark clouds were gathering, and there was every sign of a heavy rainstorm as I went out along the road in the direction indicated.

There was a damp boisterous wind, that seemed blowing from all points of the compass at once, and in a minute I was caught in a swirl of blinding rain. I took no heed of it, however, but hurried along the lonely road till I reached the cottage, which I knew at once was the one I sought. It was picturesque, but had a deserted look.

It was not till I stood in front or the door that I began to consider what I really intended to do in case I found her there. A heedless, impetuous desire to see her—to get possession of her—had brought me to Wales. But what was to be my course of action if I found her I had never given myself time to think.

If I could only clasp her in my arms and tell her I was Henry, I felt that she must, even in madness, know me and cling to me. I could not realise that any insanity could estrange her from me if I could only get near her.

I put my thumb upon the old-fashioned latch, and found that the door was not locked. It yielded to my touch, and with a throbbing of every pulse, I pushed it open and looked in.

In front of me rose a staircase, steep and narrow. There was sufficient evening light to enable me to see up the staircase, and to distinguish two black bedroom doors, now closed, on the landing. I stood on the wet threshold till my nerves grew calmer. On my right and on my left the doors of the two rooms on the ground floor were open. I could see that the one on my left was stripped of furniture.

I entered the room on my right—a low room of some considerable length, with heavy beams across the ceiling, which in that light seemed black. Two or three chairs and a table were in it. There was a brisk fire, and over it a tea-kettle of the kind much favoured by Gypsies, as I afterwards learnt. There was no grate, but an open hearth, exactly like the one in Wynne's cottage, where Winifred and I used to stand in summer evenings to see the sky, and the stars twinkling above the great sooty throat of the open chimney. I now perceived the crwth and bow upon the table. Sinfi Lovell had evidently been here since we parted. On the walls hung a few of those highly coloured prints of Scriptural subjects which, at one time, used to be seen in English farm-houses, and are still the only works of art with the Welsh peasants and a few well-to-do Welsh Gypsies who would emulate Gorgio tastes.

On the left-hand side of the room was an arched recess, in which, no doubt, had stood at one time a sideboard, or some such piece of furniture. There was no occupant of the room, however, and I grew calmer as I stood before the fire, which drew from my wet clothes a cloud of steam. The ruddy fingers of the fire-gleam playing upon the walls made the colours of the pictures seem bright as the tints of stained glass. The pathetic message of those flickering rays flowed into my soul. The red mantle of the Prodigal Son, in which he was feeding the swine, shone as though it had been soaked in sorrow and blood-red sin. The house was apparently empty; the tension of my passion became for the first time relaxed, and I passed into a strange mood of pathos, dreamy, but yet acute, in which Winifred's fate, and my mother's harshness, and my father's scarred breast, seemed all a mingled mystery of reminiscent pain.

I had not stood more than a minute, however, when I was startled into a very different mood. I thought I heard a sobbing noise, which seemed to me to come from some one overhead, some one lying upon the boards of the room above me. I was rooted to the spot where I stood, for the sob seemed scarcely human, and yet it seemed to be hers. A new feeling about Winifred's madness came upon me. I recalled Mivart's horrible description of the mimicry. My God! what was I about to see? I dared not turn and go upstairs: the fire and the singing tea-kettle were, at least, companions. But something impelled me to take the bow and draw it across the crwth-strings. Presently I thought I heard a door overhead softly open, and this was followed by the almost inaudible creak of a light footstep descending the stairs. With paralysed pulses I kept my eyes fixed on the half-open door, in the certainty of seeing her pass along the little passage leading from the staircase to the front door. But as I heard the dear footsteps descend stair after stair my horror left me, and I nearly began to sob myself. My thoughts now were all for her safety. I slipped into the recess, fearing to take her by surprise.

Soon the slim girlish figure passed into the room. And as I saw her glide along I was stunned, as though I had not expected to see her, as though I had not known the footstep coming down the stairs.

With her eyes fixed on the fireplace, she brushed past me without perceiving me, took a chair, and sat down in front of the fire, her elbows resting on her knees, and her face meditatively sunk between her hands. Her sobbing bad ceased, and unless my ears deceived me, had given place to an occasional soft happy gurgle of childish laughter.

I stepped out from the shelter of my archway into the middle of the room, dubious as to what course to pursue. I thought that, on the whole, the movement that would startle her least would be to slip quietly out of the room and out of the house while she was in the reverie, then knock at the door. She would arouse herself then, expecting to see some one, and would not be so entirely taken by surprise at the sight of my face as she would have been at finding me, without the slightest warning, standing behind her in the room. I did this: I slipped out at the door and knocked, gently at first, but got no answer; then a little louder—no answer; then louder and louder, till at last I thundered at the door in a state of growing alarm; still no answer.

'She is stone deaf,' I thought; and now I remembered having noticed, as she brushed past me, a far-off gaze in her eyes, such as some stone-deaf people show.

I re-entered the house. There she was, sitting immovably before the fire, in the same reverie. I coughed and hemmed, softly at first, then more loudly, finally with such vigour that I ran the risk of damaging my throat, and still there was no movement of that head bent over the fire and resting in the palms of the hands. At last I made a step forward, then another, finally finding myself on the knitted cloth hearthrug beside her. I now had the full view of her profile. That she should be still unconscious of my presence was unaccountable, for I stood at the end of the rug gazing at her. Again I coughed and hemmed, but without producing the smallest effect. Then I determined to address her; but I thought it would be safer to do so as a stranger than to announce myself at once as Henry.

'I beg pardon,' I said, 'but is there any one at home?'

No answer.

'Is this the way to Capel Curig?

No answer.

'Will you give me shelter?' I said; and finally I gave a desperate 'halloo.'

My efforts had not produced the slightest effect. I was now in a state of great agitation. That she was stone deaf seemed evident. But was she not in some kind of fit, though without the contortions of face Mivart had described to me—contortions which haunted me as much as though I had seen them? I stooped down and gazed into her face. There was now no terror there, nor even sorrow. I could see in her eyes sparks of pleasure, as in the eyes of an infant when it seems to see in the air pictures or colours to which our eyes are blind. Round about her cheek and mouth a little dimple was playing, exactly like the dimple that plays around the mouth of a pleased child. This marvellous expression on her face recalled to me what Mivart had said as to the form her dementia assumed between one paroxysm and another.

'Thank God,' thought I, 'she's not in a fit: she's only deaf.'

Driven to desperation, however, I seized her shoulder and shook it. This aroused her. She started up with violence, at the same time overturning the chair upon which she had been sitting. She stared at me wildly. The danger of what I had done struck me now. A fortunate inspiration caused me to say, 'Tywysog o'r Niwl.' Then there broke over her face a sweet smile of childish pleasure. She made a graceful curtsey, and said, 'You've come at last; I was thinking about you all the while.'

Shall I ever forget her expression? Her eyes were alive with light and pleasure. It was as though Winifred's soul had fled or the soul of her childhood had re-entered and taken possession of her body. But the witchery of her expression no words can describe. Never had I seen her so lovely as now. Often when a child I had seen the boatmen on the sands look at us as we passed—seen them stay in the midst of their toil, their dull faces brightening with admiration, as though a bar of unexpected sunlight had fallen across them. In the fields I had seen labourers, sitting at their simple dinner under the hedges, stay their meal to look after the child—so winning, dazzling, and strange was her beauty. And when I had first met her again, a child no longer, in the churchyard, my memory had accepted her at once as fulfilling, and more than fulfilling, all her childhood's promise. But never had she looked so bewitching as now—a poor mad girl who had lost her wits from terror.

For some time I could only keep murmuring: 'More lovely mad than sane!'

'As if I didn't know the Prince!' said she. 'You who, in fine weather or cloudy, wet or dry, are there on the hills to meet me! As if I don't know the Prince of the Mist when I see him! But how kind of you to come down here and see poor Winnie, poor lonely Winnie, at home!'

She fetched a chair, placed it in front of the fire, pointed to it with the same ravishingly childlike smile, indicating that it was for me, and then, when she saw me mechanically sit down, picked up her chair and came and sat close beside me.

In a second she was lost in a reverie as profound as that from which I had aroused her; and the only sound I heard was the rain on the window and the fitful gusts of wind playing around the cottage.

The wind having blown open the door, I got up to shut it. Winifred rose too, and again taking hold of my hand, she looked up into my face with a smile, and said, 'Don't go; I'm so lonely—poor Winnie's so lonely.'

As I held her hand in mine, and closed my other hand over it, I murmured to myself, 'If God will only give her to me like this—mad like this—I will be content.'

'Dearest,' I said, longing to put my arm round her waist—to kiss her own passionless lips—but I dared not, lest I might frighten her away, 'I will not leave you. I will never leave you. You shall never be lonely any more.'

I closed the door, and we resumed our seats.

Can I put into words what passed within my soul as we two sat by the fire, she holding my hand in her own—holding it as innocently as a child holds the hand of its mother? Can I put into words my mingled feelings of love and pity and wild grief, as I sat looking at her and murmuring, 'Yes; if God will only give her to me like this, I will be content'?

'Prince,' said she, 'your eyes look very kind!—Sweet, sweet eyes,' she continued, looking at me. 'The Prince of the Mist has love-eyes,' she repeated, as she placed the seats before the fire again.

Then I heard her murmur, 'Love-eyes! love-eyes! Henry's love-eyes!' Then a terrible change came over her. She sprang up and came and peered in my face. An indescribable expression of terror overspread her features, her nostrils expanded, her lips were drawn tightly over her teeth, her eyes seemed starting from their sockets; her throat suddenly became fluted like the throat of an aged woman, then veined with knotted, cruel cords. Then she stood as transfixed, and her face was mimicking that appalling look on her father's face which I had seen in the moonlight. With a yell of 'Father!' she leapt from me. Then she rushed from the house, and I could hear her run by the window, crying, 'Cursed, cursed, cursed by Henry's father!'

For an instant the movement took away my breath; but I soon recovered and sprang after her to the door.

There, in the distance, I saw her in the rain, running along the road. My first impulse was to follow her and run her down. But luckily I considered the effect this might have in increasing her terror, and stopped. She was soon out of sight. I wandered about the road calling her name, and calling on Heaven to have a little pity—a little mercy.

III

I decided to return to the house, but found that I had lost my way in the obscurity and pelting rain. For hours I wandered about, without the slightest clue as to where I was. I was literally soaked to the skin. Several times I fell into holes in a morass, and was up to my hips in moss and mud and water. Then I began to call out for assistance till I was hoarse. I might as well have called out on an uninhabited island.

The night wore on, and the darkness grew so intense that I could scarcely see my hand when I held it up. Every star in the heavens was hid away as by a thick-pall. The darkness was positively benumbing to the faculties, and added, if possible, to the misery I was in on account of Winifred. Suddenly my progress was arrested. I had fallen violently against something. A human body, a woman! I thrust out my hand and seized a woman's damp arm.

'Winifred,' I cried, 'it's Henry.'

'I thought as much.' said the voice of the Gypsy girl I had met at the wayside inn, and she seized me by the throat with a fearful grip. 'You've been to the cottage and skeared her away, and now she's seed you there she'll never come back; she'll wander about the hills till she drops down dead, or falls over the brinks.'

'O God!' I cried, as I struggled away from her. 'Winifred! Winifred!

There was silence between us then.

'You seem mighty fond on her, young man,' said the Gypsy at length, in a softened voice, 'and you don't strike out at me for grabbin' your throat.'

'Winifred! Winifred!' I said, as I thought of her on the hills on a night like this.

'You seem mighty fond on her, young man,' repeated the girl's voice in the darkness.

But I could afford no words for her, so cruelly was misery lacerating me.

'Reia,' said the Gypsy, 'did I hurt your throat just now? I hope I didn't; but you see she was the only one of 'em ever I liked, Gorgio or Gorgie, 'cept Mrs. Davies, lad or wench. I know'd her as a child, and arterwards, when a fine English lady, as poor as a church-mouse, tried to spile her, a-makin' her a fine lady too, I thought she'd forget all about me. But not she. I never once called at Mrs. Davies's house with my crwth, as she taught me to play on, but out Winnie would come with her bright eyes an' say, "Oh, I'm so glad!" She meant she was glad to see me, bless the kind heart on her. An' when I used to see her on the hills, she'd come runnin' up to me, and she'd put her little hand in mine, she would, an' chatter away, she would, as we went up an' up. An' one day, when she heard me callin' one o' the Romany chies sister, she says, "Is that your sister?" an' when I says, "No; but the Romany chies call each other sister," then says she, pretending not to know all about our Romany ways, "Sinfi, I'm very fond on you, may I call you sister?" An' she had sich ways; an' she's the only Gorgio or Gorgie, 'cept Mrs. Davies, as I ever liked, lad or wench.'

The Gypsy's simple words came like a new message of comfort and hope, but I could not speak.

'Young man,' she continued, 'are you there?' and she put out her hand to feel for me.

I took hold of the hand. No words passed; none were needed. Never had
I known friendship before. After a short time I said,

'What shall we do, Sinfi?'

'I shall wait a bit, till the stars are out,' said she. 'I know they're a-comin' out by the feel o' the wind. Then I shall walk up a path as Winnie knows. The sun'll be up ready for me by the time I get to the part I wants to go to. You know, young man, I must find her. She'll never come back to the cottage no more, now she's been skeared away from it.'

'But I must accompany you,' I said.

'No, no, you mustn't do that,' said the Gypsy; 'she might take fright and fall and be killed. Besides,' said she, 'Winifred Wynne's under a cuss; it's bad luck to follow up anybody under a cuss.'

'But you are following her,' I said.

'Ah, but that's different. "Gorgio cuss never touched Romany," as my mammy, as had the seein' eye, used to say.'

'But,' I exclaimed vehemently, 'I want to be cursed with her. I have followed her to be cursed with her. I mean to go with you.'

'Young man,' said she, 'are there many o' your sort among the
Gorgios?'

'I don't know and I don't care,' said I.

''Cause,' said she, 'that sayin' o' yourn is a fine sight liker a Romany chi's nor a Romany chal's. It's the chies as sticks to the dials, cuss or no cuss. I wish the chals 'ud stick as close to the chies.'

After much persuasion, however, I induced the Gypsy to let me accompany her, promising to abide implicitly by her instructions.

Even while we were talking the rain had ceased, and patches of stars were shining brilliantly. These patches got rapidly larger. Sinfi Lovell proposed that we should go to the cottage, dry our clothes, and furnish ourselves with a day's provisions, which she said a certain cupboard in the cottage would supply, and also with her crwth, which she appeared to consider essential to the success of the enterprise.

'She's fond o' the crwth,' she said. 'She allus wanted Mrs. Davies to larn her to play it, but her aunt never would, 'cause when it's played by a maid on the hills to the Welsh dukkerin' gillie, [Footnote 1] the spirits o' Snowdon and the livin' mullos [Footnote 2] o' them as she's fond on will sometimes come and show themselves, and she said Winnie wasn't at all the sort o' gal to feel comfable with spirits moving round her. She larnt me it, though. It's only when the crwth is played by a maid on the hills that the spirits can follow it.'

[Footnote 1: Dukkerin gillie, incantation song.]

[Footnote 2: Livin' mullos, wraiths.]

We did as Shift suggested, and afterwards began our search. She proposed that we should go at once to Knockers' Llyn, where she had seen Winifred the day before sitting and talking to herself. We proceeded towards the spot.

IV

The Gypsy girl was as lithe and active as Winifred herself, and vastly more powerful. I was wasted by illness and fatigue. Along the rough path we went, while the morning gradually broke over the east. Great isles and continents of clouds were rolled and swirled from peak to peak, from crag to crag, across steaming valley and valley; iron-grey at first, then faintly tinged with rose, which grew warmer and richer and deeper every moment.

'It's a-goin' to be one of the finest sunrises ever seed,' said the Gypsy girl. 'Dordi! the Gorgios come to see our sunrises,' she continued, with the pride of an owner of Snowdon. 'You know this is the only way to see the hills. You may ride up the Llanberis side in a go-cart.'

Racked with anxiety as I was. I found it a relief during the ascent to listen to the Gypsy's talk about Winifred. She gave me a string of reminiscences about her that enchained, enchanted, and yet harrowed me. A strong friendship had already sprung up between me and my companion; and I was led to tell her about the cross and the curse, the violation of my father's tomb and its disastrous consequences. She was evidently much awed by the story.

'Well,' said she, when I had stopped to look round, 'it's my belief as the cuss is a-workin' now, and'll have to spend itself. If it could ha' spent itself on the feyther as did the mischief, why all well an' good, but, you see, he's gone, an' left it to spend itself on his chavi; jist the way with 'em Gorgio feythers an' Romany daddies. It'll have to spend itself, though, that cuss will, I'm afeard.'

'But,' I said, 'you don't mean that you think for her father's crime she'll have to beg her bread in desolate places.'

'I do though, wusser luck,' said the Gypsy solemnly, stopping suddenly, and standing still as a statue.

'And this,' I ejaculated, 'is the hideous belief of all races in all times! Monstrous if a lie—more monstrous if true! Anyhow I'll find her. I'll traverse the earth till I find her. I'll share her lot with her, whatever it may be, and wherever it may be in the world. If she's a beggar, I'll beg by her side.'

'Right you are, brother,' said the Gypsy, breaking in enthusiastically. 'I likes to hear a man say that. You're liker a Romany chi nor a Romany chal, the more I see of you. What I says to our people is:—"If the Romany chals would only stick by the Romany chies as the Romany chies sticks by the Romany chals, where 'ud the Gorgios be then? Why, the Romanies would be the strongest people on the arth." But you see, reia, about this cuss—a cuss has to work itself out, jist for all the world like the bite of a sap.' [Footnote]

[Footnote: Sap, a snake.]

Then she continued, with great earnestness, looking across the kindling expanse of hill and valley before us: 'You know, the very dead things round us,—these here peaks, an' rocks, an' lakes, an' mountains—ay, an' the woods an' the sun an' the sky above our heads,—cusses us when we do anythink wrong. You may see it by the way they looks at you. Of course I mean when you do anythink wrong accordin' to us Romanies. I don't mean wrong accordin' to the Gorgios: they're two very different kinds o' wrongs.'

'I don't see the difference,' said I; 'but tell me more about
Winifred.'

'You don't see the difference?' said Sinfi. 'Well then, I do. It's wrong to tell a lie to a Romany, ain't it? But is it wrong to tell a lie to a Gorgio? Not a bit of it. And why? 'Cause most Gorgios is fools and wants lies, an' that gives the poor Romanies a chance. But this here cuss is a very bad kind 'o cuss. It's a dead man's cuss, and what's wuss, him as is cussed is dead and out of the way, and so it has to be worked out in the blood of his child. But when she's done that, when she's worked it out of her blood, things'll come right agin if the cross is put back agin on your father's buzzum.'

'When she has done what?' I said.

'Begged her bread in desolate places,' said the Gypsy girl solemnly. 'Then if the cross is put back agin on your feyther's buzzum, I believe things'll all come right. It's bad the cusser was your feyther though.'

'But why?' I asked.

'There's nobody can't hurt you and them you're fond on as your own breed can. As my poor mammy used to say, "For good or for ill you must dig deep to bury your daddy." But you know, brother, the wust o' this job is that it's a trúshul as has been stole.'

'A trúshul?'

'What you call a cross. There's nothin' in the world so strong for cussin' and blessin' as a trúshul, unless the stars shinin' in the river or the hand in the clouds is as strong. Why, I tell you there's nothin' a trúshul can't do, whether it's curin' a man as is bit by a sap, or wipin' the very rainbow out o' the sky by jist layin' two sticks crossways, or even curin' the cramp in your legs by jist settin' your shoes crossways; there's nothin' for good or bad a trúshul can't do if it likes. Hav'n't you never heer'd o' the dukkeripen o' the trúshul shinin' in the sunset sky when the light o' the sinkin' sun shoots up behind a bar o' clouds an' makes a kind o fiery cross? But to go and steal a trushul out of a dead man's tomb—why, it's no wonder as the Wynnes is cussed, feyther and child.'

I could not have tolerated this prattle about Gypsy superstitions had I not observed that through it all the Gypsy was on the qui vive, looking for the traces of her path that Winifred had unconsciously left behind her. Had the Gypsy been following the trail with the silence of an American Indian, she could not have worked more carefully than she was now working while her tongue went rattling on. I afterwards found this to be a characteristic of her race, as I afterwards found that what is called the long sight of the Gypsies (as displayed in the following of the patrin [Footnote: Trail]) is not long sight at all, but is the result of a peculiar faculty the Gypsies have of observing more closely than Gorgios do everything that meets their eyes in the woods and on the hills and along the roads. When we reached the spot indicated by the Gypsy as being Winifred's haunt, the ledge where she was in the habit of coming for her imaginary interviews with the 'Prince of the Mist,' we did not stay there, but for a time still followed the path, which from this point became rougher and rougher, alongside deep precipices and chasms. Every now and then she would stop on a ledge of rock, and, without staying her prattle for a moment, stoop down and examine the earth with eyes that would not have missed the footprint of a rat. When I saw her pause, as she sometimes would in the midst of her scrutiny, to gaze inquiringly down some gulf, which then seemed awful to my inexperienced eyes, but which later on in the day, when I came to see the tremendous chasms of that side of Snowdon, seemed insignificant enough, the circulation of my blood would seem to stop, and then rush again through my body more violently than before. And while the 'patrin-chase' went on, and the morning grew brighter and brighter, the Gypsy's lithe, catlike tread never faltered. The rise and fall of her bosom were as regular and as calm as in the public-house. Such agility and such staying power in a woman astonished me. Finding no trace of Winnie, we returned to the little plateau by Knockers' Llyn.

'This is the place,' said the Gypsy; 'it used to be called in old times the haunted llyn, because when you sings the Welsh dukkerin gillie here or plays it on a crwth, the Knockers answers it. I dare say you've heard o' what the Gorgios call the triple echo o' Llyn Ddu'r Arddu. Well, it's somethin' like that, only bein' done by the knocking sperrits, it's grander and don't come 'cept when they hears the Welsh dukkerin gillie. Now, you must hide yourself somewheres while I go and touch the crwth in her favourite place. I think she'll come to that. I wish though I hadn't brought ye,' she continued, looking at me meditatively; 'you're a little winded a-ready, and we ain't begun the rough climbing at all. Up to this 'ere pool Winnie and me and Rhona Boswell used to climb when we was children; it needed longer legs nor ourn to get farther up, and you're winded a-ready. If she should come on you suddent, she's liker than not to run for a mile or more up that path where we've just been and then to jump down one of them chasms you've just seed. But if she does pop on ye, don't you try to grab her, whatever you do; leave me alone for that. You ain't got strength enough to grab a hare; you ought to be in bed. Besides, she won't be skeared at me. But,' she continued, turning round to look at the vast circuit of peaks stretching away as far as the eye could reach, 'we shall have to ketch her to-day somehow. She'll never go back to the cottage where you went and skeared her; and if she don't have a fall, she'll run about these here hills till she drops. We shall have to ketch her to-day somehow. I'm in hopes she'll come to the sound of my crwth, she's so uncommon fond on it; and if she don't come in the flesh, p'rhaps her livin' mullo will come, and that'll show she's alive.'

She placed me in a crevice overlooking the small lake, or pool, which on the opposite side was enclosed in a gorge, opening only by a cleft to the east. Then she unburdened herself of a wallet containing the breakfast, saying, 'When I come back we'll fall to and breakfiss.' She then, as though she were following the trail, made a circuit of the pool and disappeared through the gorge. All round the pool there was a narrow ragged ledge leading to this eastern opening. I stood concealed in my crevice and looked at the peaks, or rather at the vast masses of billowy vapours enveloping them, as they sometimes boiled and sometimes blazed, shaking—when the sun struck one and then another—from brilliant amethyst to vermilion, shot occasionally with purple, or gold, or blue.

A radiance now came pouring through the eastern opening down the gorge or cwm itself, and soon the light vapours floating about the pool were turned to sailing gauzes, all quivering with different dyes, as though a rainbow had become torn from the sky and woven into gossamer hangings and set adrift.

Fatigue was beginning to numb my senses and to conquer my brain. The acuteness of my mental anguish had consumed itself in its own intense fires. The idea of Winifred's danger became more remote. The mist-pageants of the morning seemed somehow to emanate from Winnie.

'No one is worthy to haunt such a scene as this,' I murmured, sinking against the rock, 'but Winifred—so beautiful of body and pure of soul. Would that I were indeed her "Prince of the Mist," and that we could die here together with Sinfi's strains in our ears.'

Then I felt coming over me strange influences which afterwards became familiar to me—influences which I can only call the spells of Snowdon. They were far more intense than those strange, sweet, wild, mesmeric throbs which I used to feel in Graylingham Wood, and which my ancestress, Fenella Stanley, seems also to have known, but they were akin to them. Then came the sound of Sinfi's crwth and song, and in the distance repetitions of it, as though the spirits of Snowdon were, in very truth, joining in a chorus.

At once a marvellous change came over me. I seemed to be listening to my ancestress, Fenella Stanley, and not to Sinfi Lovell. I was hearing that strain which in my childhood I had so often tried to imagine, and it was conjuring up the morning sylphs of the mountain air and all the 'flower-sprites' and 'sunshine elves' of Snowdon.

V

I shook off the spell when the music ceased; then I began to wonder why the Gypsy did not return. I was now faint and almost famished for want of food. I opened the Gypsy's wallet. There was the substantial and tempting breakfast she had brought from the cottage cupboard—cold beef and bread, and ale. I spread the breakfast on the ground.

Scarcely had I done so when a figure appeared at the opening of the gorge and caught the ruddy flood of light. It was Winifred, bare-headed. I knew it was she, and I waited in breathless suspense, crouching close up into the crevice, dreading lest she should see me and be frightened away. She stood in the eastern cleft of the gorge against the sun for fully half a minute, looking around as a stag might look that was trying to give the hunters the slip.

'She has seen the Gypsy,' I thought, 'and been scared by her.' Then she came down and glided along the side of the pool. At first she did not see me, though she stood opposite and stopped, while the opalescent vapours from the pool steamed around her, and she shone as through a glittering veil, her eyes flashing like sapphires. The palpitation of my heart choked me; I dared not stir, I dared not speak; the slightest movement or the slightest sound might cause her to start away. There was she whom I had travelled and toiled to find—there was she, so close to me, and yet must I let her pass and perhaps lose her after all—for ever?

Where was the Gypsy girl? I was in an agony of desire to see her or hear her crwth, and yet her approach might frighten Winifred to her destruction.

But Winifred, who had now seen me, did not bound away with that heart-quelling yell of hers which I had dreaded. No, I perceived to my astonishment that the flash of the eyes was not of alarm, but of greeting to me—pleasure at seeing me! She came close to the water, and then I saw a smile on her face through the misty film—a flash of shining teeth.

'May I come?' she said.

'Yes, Winifred,' I gasped, scarcely knowing what I said in my surprise and joy.

She came slipping round the pool, and in a few seconds was by my side. Her clothes were saturated with last night's rain, but though she looked very cold, she did not shiver, a proof that she had not lain down on the hills, but had walked about during the whole night. There was no wildness of the maniac—there was no idiotic stare. But oh the witchery of the gaze!

If one could imagine the look on the face of a wanderer from the cloud-palaces of the sylphs, or the gaze in the eyes of a statue newly animated by the passion of the sculptor who had fashioned it, or the smile on the face of a wondering Eve just created upon the earth—any one of these expressions would, perhaps, give the idea of that on Winifred's face as she stood there.

'May I sit down, Prince?' said she.

'Yes, Winnie,' I replied; 'I've been waiting for you.'

'Been waiting for poor Winnie?' she said, her eyes sparkling anew with pleasure; and she sat down close by my side, gazing hungrily at the food—her hands resting on her lap.

I laid my hand upon one of hers; it was so damp and cold that it made me shudder.

'Why, Winifred,' I said, 'how cold you are!' 'The hills are so cold!' said she, 'so cold when the stars go out, and the red streaks begin to come.'

'May I warm your hands in mine, Winnie?' I said, longing to clasp the dear fingers, but trembling lest anything I might say or do should bring about a repetition of last night's catastrophe.

'Will you, Prince?' said she. 'How very, very kind!' and in a moment the hand was between mine.

Remembering that it was through looking into my eyes that she recognised me in the cottage, I now avoided looking straight into hers. All this time she kept gazing wistfully at the food spread out on the ground.

'Are you hungry, Winifred?' I said.

'Oh yes; so hungry!' said she, shaking her head in a sad meditative way. 'Poor Winifred is so hungry and cold and lonely!'

'Will you breakfast with the Prince of the Mist, Winifred?'

'Oh, may I, Prince?' she asked, her face beaming with delight.

'To be sure you may, Winnie. You may always breakfast with the Prince of the Mist if you like.'

'Always? Always?' she repeated.

'Yes, Winnie,' I said, as I handed her some bread and meat, which she devoured ravenously.

'Yes, dear Winnie,' I continued, handing her a foaming horn of Sinfi's ale, to which she did as full justice as she was doing to the bread and meat. 'Yes, I want you to breakfast with me and dine with me always.'

'Do you mean live with you, Prince?' she asked, looking me dreamily in the face—'live with you behind the white mist? Is this our wedding breakfast, Prince?'

'Yes, Winnie.'

Then her eyes wandered down over her dress, and she said, 'Ah! how strange I did not notice my green fairy kirtle before. And I declare I never felt till this moment the wreath of gold leaves round my forehead. Do they shine much in the sun?'

'They quite dazzle me, Winnie,' I said, arching my hand above my eyes, as if to protect them from the glare.

'Do you have a nice fire there when it's very cold?' she said.

'Yes, Winifred,' I said.

She then sank into silence, while I kept plying her with food.

After she had appeased her hunger she sat looking into the pool, quite unconscious, apparently, of my presence by her side, and lost in a reverie similar to that which I had seen at the cottage.

The form her dementia had taken was unlike anything that I had ever conceived. Madness seemed too coarse a word to denote so wonderful and fascinating a mental derangement. Mivart's comparison to a musical-box recurred to me, and seemed most apt. She was in a waking dream. The peril lay in breaking through that dream and bringing her real life before her. There was a certain cogency of dreamland in all she said and did. And I found that she sank into silent reverie simply because she waited, like a person in sleep, for the current of her thoughts to be directed and dictated by external phenomena. As she sat there gazing in the pool, her hand gradually warming between my two hands, I felt that never when sane, never in her most bewitching moments, had she been so lovable as she was now. This new kind of spell she exercised over me it would be impossible to describe. But it sprang from the expression on her face of that absolute freedom from all self-consciousness which is the great charm in children, combined with the grace and beauty of her own matchless girlhood. A desire to embrace her, to crush her to my breast, seized me like a frenzy.

'Winifred,' I said, 'you are very cold.'

But she was now insensible to sound. I knew from experience now that I must shake her to bring her back to consciousness, for evidently, in her fits of reverie, the sounds falling upon her ear were not conveyed to the brain at all.

I shook her gently, and said, 'The Prince of the Mist.'

She started back to life. My idea had been a happy one. My words had at once sent her thoughts into the right direction for me.

'Pardon me, Prince,' said she, smiling; 'I had forgotten that you were here.'

'Winifred, I've warmed this hand, now give me the other.'

She stretched her other hand across her breast and gave it to me. This brought her entire body close to me, and I said, 'Winnie, you are cold all over. Won't you let the Prince of the Mist put his arms round you and warm you?'

'Oh, I should like it so much,' she said. 'But are you warm, Prince? are you really warm?—your mist is mostly very cold.'

'Quite warm, Winifred,' I said, as with my heart swelling in my breast, and with eyelids closing over my eyes from very joy, I drew her softly upon my breast once more.

'Yes—yes,' I murmured, as the tears gushed from my eyes and dropped upon the soft hair that I was kissing. 'If God will but let me have her thus! I ask for nothing better than to possess a maniac.'

As we sat locked in each other's arms the head of Sinfi appeared round the eastern cliff of the gorge where I had first seen Winifred. The Gypsy had evidently been watching us from there. I perceived that she was signalling to me that I was not to grasp Winifred. Then I saw Sinfi suddenly and excitedly point to the sky over the rock beneath which we sat. I looked up. The upper sky above us was now clear of morning mist, and right over our heads, Winifred's and mine, there hung a little morning cloud like a feather of flickering rosy gold. I looked again towards the corner of jutting rock, but Sinfi's head had disappeared.

'Dear Prince,' said Winifred, 'how delightfully warm you are! How kind of you! But are not your arms a little too tight, dear Prince? Poor Winnie cannot breathe. And this thump, thump, thump, like a—like a—fire-engine—ah!'

Too late I knew what my folly had done. The turbulent action of my heart had had a sympathetic effect upon hers. It seemed as if her senses, if not her mind, had remembered another occasion, when, as she was lying in my arms, the beating of my heart had disturbed her. In one lightning-flash her real life and all its tragedy broke mercilessly in upon her. The idea of the 'Prince of the Mist' fled. She started up and away from me. The awful mimicry of her father's expression spread over her face. With a yell of 'Fy Nhad,' and then a yell of 'Father!' she darted round the pool, and then, bounding up the rugged path like a chamois, disappeared behind a corner of jutting rock.

At the same moment the head of the Gypsy girl reappeared round the eastern cleft of the gorge. Sinfi came quickly up to me and whispered, 'Don't follow.'

'I will,' I said.

'No, you won't,' said she, seizing my wrist with a grip of iron. 'If you do she's done for. Do you know where she is running to? A couple of furlongs up that path there's another that branches off on the right; it ain't more nor a futt-an'-a-half wide along a precipuss more nor a hundred futt deep. She knows it well. She'll make for that. The cuss is on her wuss nor ever, judgin' from the gurn and the flash of her teeth.'

I waited for two or three seconds in the wildest impatience.

'Let's follow her now,' I said.

'No, no,' she whispered, 'not yet, 'less you want to see her tumble down the cliff.' After a few minutes Sinfi and I went up the main pathway. Winnie seemed to have slackened her pace when she was out of sight, for we saw her just turning away on the right at the point indicated by Sinfi. 'Give her time to get along that path,' said she, 'and then she'll be all right.'

In a state of agonised suspense I stood there waiting. At last I said:

'I must go after her. We shall lose her—I know we shall lose her.'

Sinfi demurred a moment, then acceded to my wish, and we went up the main pathway and peered round the corner of the jutting rock where Winifred had last been visible. There, along a ragged shelf bordering a yawning chasm—a shelf that seemed to me scarce wide enough for a human foot—Winifred was running and balancing herself as surely as a bird over the abyss.

'Mind she doesn't turn round sharp and see you,' said the Gypsy. 'If she does she'll lose her head and over she'll fall!'

I crouched and gazed at Winifred as she glided along towards a vast mountain of vapour that was rolling over the chasm close to her. She stood and looked into the floating mass for a moment, and then passed into it and was lost from view.

VI

'Now I can follow her,' said Sinfi; 'but you mustn't try to come along here. Wait till I come back. I suppose you've given her all the breakfiss. Give me a drop of brandy out o' your flask.'

I gave her some brandy and took a long draught of the burning liquor myself, for I was fainting.

'I shall go with you,' I said.

'Dordi,' said the Gypsy, 'how quickly you'd be a-layin' at the bottom there!' and she pointed down into the gulf at our feet.

'I shall go with you,' I said.

'No, you won't,' said the Gypsy doggedly; ''cause I sha'n't go. I shall git round and meet her. I know where we shall strike across her slot. She'll be makin' for Llanberis.'

'I let her escape,' I moaned. 'I had her in my arms once; but you signalled to me not to grip her.'

'If you had ha' grabbed her,' said the Gypsy, 'she'd ha' pulled you along like a feather—she's so mad strong. You go hack to the llyn.'

The Gypsy girl passed along the shelf and was soon lost in the veil of vapour.

I returned to the llyn and threw myself down upon the ground, for my legs sank under me, but the dizziness of fatigue softened the effect of my distress. The rocks and peaks were swinging round my head. Soon I found the Gypsy bending over me.

'I can't find her,' said she. 'We had best make haste and strike across her path as she makes for Llanberis. I have a notion as she's sure to do that.'

As fast as we could scramble along those rugged tracks we made our way to the point where the Gypsy expected that Winifred would pass. We remained for hours, beating about in all directions in search of her,—Sinti every now and then touching her crwth with the bow,—but without any result.

'It's my belief she's gone straight down to Llanberis,' said Sinfi; 'and we'd best lose no time, but go there too.'

We went right to the top of the mountain and rested for a little time on y Wyddfa, Sinfi taking some bread and cheese and ale in the cabin there. Then we descended the other side. I had not sense then to notice the sunset-glories, the peaks of mountains melting into a sky of rose and light-green, over which a phalanx of fiery clouds was filing; and yet I see it all now as I write, and I hear what I did not seem to hear then, the musical chant of a Welsh guide ahead of us, who was conducting a party of happy tourists to Llanberis.

When we reached the village, we spent hours in making searches and inquiries, but could find no trace of her. Oh, the appalling thought of Winifred wandering about all night famishing on the hills! I went to the inn which Sinfi pointed out to me, while she went in quest of some Gypsy friends, who, she said, were stopping in the neighbourhood. She promised to come to me early in the morning, in order that we might renew our search at break of day.

When I turned into bed after supper I said to myself: 'There will be no sleep for me this night.' But I was mistaken. So great was my fatigue that sleep came upon me with a strength that was sudden and irresistible; when the servant came to call me at sunrise, I felt as though I had but just gone to bed. It was, no doubt, this sound sleep, and entire respite from the tension of mind I had undergone, which saved me from another serious illness.

I found the Gypsy already waiting for me below, preparing for the labours before her by making a hearty meal on salt beef and ale.

'Reia,' said she, pointing to the beef with her knife, 'we sha'n't get bite nor sup, 'cept what we carry, either inside or out, for twelve hours,—perhaps not for twenty-four. Before I give up this slot there ain't a path, nor a hill, nor a rock, nor a valley, nor a precipuss as won't feel my fut. Come! set to.'

I took the Gypsy's advice, made as hearty a breakfast as I could, and we left Llanberis in the light of morning. It was not till we had reached and passed a place called Gwastadnant Gate that the path along which we went became really wild and difficult. The Gypsy seemed to know every inch of the country.

We reached a beautiful lake, where Sinfi stopped, and I began to question her as to what was to be our route.

'Winnie know'd,' said she, 'some Welsh folk as fish in this 'ere lake. She might ha' called 'em to mind, poor thing, and come off here. I'm a-goin' to ask about her.'

Sinfi's inquiries here—her inquiries everywhere that day—ended in nothing but blank and cruel disappointment.

Remembering that Winifred's very earliest childhood was passed near
Carnarvon, I proposed to the Gypsy that we should go thither at once.

After sleeping again at Llanberis, we went to Carnarvon, but soon returned to the other side of Snowdon, for at Carnarvon we could find no trace of her.

'Oh, Sinfi,' I said; as we stood watching the peculiar bright yellow trout in Lake Ogwen, 'she is starving—starving on the hills—while millions of people are eating, gorging, wasting food. I shall go mad!'

Sinfi looked at me mournfully, and said:

'It's a bad job, reia, but if poor Winnie Wynne's a-starvin' it ain't
the fault o' them as happens to ha' got the full belly. There ain't a
Romany in Wales, nor there ain't a Gorgio nuther, as wouldn't give
Winnie a crust, if wonst we could find her.'

'To think of this great, rich world,' I exclaimed (to myself, not to the Gypsy), 'choke-full of harvest, bursting with grain, while famishing on the hills for a mouthful is she—the one!'

'Reia,' said Sinfi, with much solemnity, 'the world's full o' vittles; what's wanted is jist a hand as can put the vittles and the mouths where they ought to be—cluss togither. That's what the hungry Romany says when he snares a hare or a rabbit.'

We walked on. After a while Sinfi said: 'A Romany knows more o' these here kinds o' things, reia, than a Gorgio does. It's my belief as Winnie Wynne ain't a-starvin' on the hills; she ain't got to starve; she's on'y got to beg her bread. She'll have to do that, of course; but beggin' ain't so bad as starvin', after all! There's some as begs for the love on it. Videy does.'

I knew by this time that it was useless to battle against Sinfi's conviction that the curse would have to be literally fulfilled, so I kept silence. While she was speaking I was suddenly struck by a thought that ought to have come before.

'Sinfi,' I said, 'didn't you know an English lady named Dalrymple, who lodged with Mrs. Davies for some years?'

'Yis,' said Sinfi, 'and I did think o' her. She went to live at Carnarvon. But supposin' that Winnie had gone to the English lady—supposin' that she know'd where to find her—the lady 'ud never ha' let her go away, she was so fond on her. It was Miss Dalrymple as sp'ilt Winnie, a-givin' her lady-notions.'

However, I determined to see Miss Dalrymple, and started alone for Carnarvon at once. By making inquiries at the Carnarvon post-office I found Miss Dalrymple, a pale-faced, careworn lady of extraordinary culture, who evinced the greatest affection for Winifred. She had seen nothing of her, and was much distressed at the fragments of Winifred's story which I thought it well to give her. When she bade me good-bye, she said, 'I know something of your family. I know your mother and aunt. The sweet girl you are seeking is in my judgment one of the most gifted young women living. Her education, as you may be aware, she owes mainly to me. But she took to every kind of intellectual pursuit by instinct. Reared in a poor Welsh cottage as she was, there is, I believe, almost no place in society that she is not fitted to fill.'

On leaving Carnarvon I returned to Sinfi Lovell.

But why should I weary the reader by a detailed account of my wanderings and searchings with my strange guide that day, and the next, and the next? Why should I burthen him with the mental agonies I suffered as Sinfi and I, during the following days, explored the country for miles and miles—right away beyond the Cross Foxes, as far as Dolgelley and the region of Cader Idris? At last, one evening, when I and Rhona Boswell and some of her family were walking down Snowdon towards Llanberis, Sinfi announced her conviction that Winifred was no longer in the Snowdon region at all, perhaps not even in Wales at all.

'You mean, I suppose, that she is dead,' I said.

'Dead?' said Sinfi, the mysterious sibylline look returning immediately to her face, that had just seemed so frank and simple. 'She ain't got to die; she's only got to beg. But I shall ha' to leave you now. I can't do you no more good. And besides, my daddy's goin' into the Eastern Counties with the Welsh ponies, and so is Jasper Bozzell and Rhona. Videy and me are goin' too, in course.'

With deep regret and dismay I felt that I must part from her. How well I remember that evening. I feel as now I write the delicious summer breeze of Snowdon blowing on my forehead. The sky, which for some time had been growing very rich, grew at every moment rarer in colour, and glassed itself in the llyns which shone with an enjoyment of the beauty like the magic mirrors of Snowdonian spirits. The loveliness indeed was so bewitching that one or two of the Gypsies—a race who are, as I had already noticed, among the few uncultivated people that show a susceptibility to the beauties of nature—gave a long sigh of pleasure, and lingered at the llyn of the triple echo, to see how the soft iridescent opal brightened and shifted into sapphire and orange, and then into green and gold. As a small requital of her valuable services I offered her what money I had about me, and promised to send as much more as she might require as soon as I reached the hotel at Dolgelley, where at the moment my portmanteau was lying in the landlord's charge.

'Me take money for tryin' to find my sister, Winnie Wynne?' said Sinfi, in astonishment more than in anger. 'Seein', reia, as I'd jist sell everythink I've got to find her, I should like to know how many gold balansers [sovereigns] 'ud pay me. No, reia, Winnie Wynne ain't in Wales at all, else I'd never give up this patrin-chase. So fare ye well;' and she held out her hand, which I grasped, reluctant to let it go.

'Fare ye well, reia,' she repeated, as she walked swiftly away; 'I wonder whether we shall ever meet agin.'

'Indeed, I hope so,' I said.

Her sister Videy, who with Rhona Boswell was walking near us, was present at the parting—a bright-eyed, dark-skinned little girl, a head shorter than Sinfi. I saw Videy's eyes glisten greedily at sight of the gold, and, after we had parted, I was not at all surprised, though I knew her father, Panuel Lovell, a frequenter of Raxton fairs, to be a man of means, when she came back and said, with a coquettish smile,

'Give the bright balansers to Lady Sinfi's poor sister, my rei; give the balansers to the poor Gypsy, my rei.'

Rhona, however, instead of joining Videy in the prayer for backsheesh, ran down the path in the footsteps of Sinfi.

What money I had about me I was carrying loose in my waistcoat pocket, and I pulled it out, gold and silver together. I picked out the sovereigns (five) and gave them to her, retaining half-a-sovereign and the silver for my use before returning to the hotel at Dolgelley. Videy took the sovereigns and then pointed, with a dazzling smile, to the half-sovereign, saying, 'Give Lady Sinfi's poor sister the posh balanser [half-sovereign], my rei.'

I gave her the half-sovereign,' when she immediately pointed to a half-crown in my hand, and said, 'Give the poor Gypsy the posh-courna, my rei.'

So grateful was I to the very name of Lovell, that I was hesitating whether to do this, when I was suddenly aware of the presence of Sinfi, who had returned with Rhona. In a moment Videy's wrist was in a grip I had become familiar with, and the money fell to the ground. Sinfi pointed to the money and said some words in Romany. Videy stooped and picked the coins up in evident alarm. Sinfi then said some more words in Romany, whereupon Videy held out the money to me. I felt it best to receive it, though Sinfi never once looked at me; and I could not tell what expression her own honest face wore, whether of deadly anger or mortal shame. The two sisters walked off in silence together, while Rhona set up a kind of war-dance behind them, and the three went down the path.

In a few minutes Sinfi again returned and, pointing in great excitement to the sunset sky, cried, 'Look, look! The Dukkeripen of the trúshul.' [Footnote] And indeed, the sunset was now making a spectacle such as might have aroused a spasm of admiration in the most prosaic breast. As I looked at it and then turned to look at Sinfi's noble features, illumined and spiritualised by a light that seemed more than earthly, a new feeling came upon me as though y Wyddfa and the clouds were joining in a prophecy of hope.

[Footnote: Cross.]

VII

After losing Sinfi I hired some men to assist me in my search. Day after day did we continue the quest; but no trace of Winifred could be found. The universal opinion was that she had taken sudden alarm at something, lost her foothold, and fallen down a precipice, as so many unfortunate tourists had done in North Wales. One day I and one of my men met, on a spur of the Glyder, the tourist of the flint implements with whom I had conversed at Bettws y Coed. He was alone, geologising or else searching for flint implements on the hills. Evidently my haggard appearance startled him. But when he learnt what was my trouble he became deeply interested. He told me that one day after our meeting at 'The Royal Oak,' Bettws y Coed, he had met a wild-looking girl as he was using his geologist's hammer on the mountains. She was bareheaded, and had taken fright at him, and had run madly in the direction of the most dangerous chasm on the range; he had pursued her, hoping to save her from destruction, but lost sight of her close to the chasm's brink. The expression on his face told me what his thoughts were as to her fate. He accompanied me to the chasm. It was indeed a dreadful place. We got to the bottom by a winding path, and searched till dusk among the rocks and torrents, finding nothing. But I felt that in wild and ragged pits like those, covered here and there with rough and shaggy brushwood, and full of wild cascades and deep pools, a body might well be concealed till doomsday.

My kind-hearted companion accompanied me for some miles, and did his best to dispel my gloom by his lively and intelligent talk. We parted at Pen y Gwryd. I never saw him again. I never knew his name. Should these lines ever come beneath his eyes he will know that though the great ocean of human life rolls between his life-vessel and mine, I have not forgotten how and where once we touched.

But how could I rest? Though Hope herself was laughing my hopes to scorn, how could I rest? How could I cease to search?

Bitter as it was to wander about the hills teasing my soul by delusions which other people must fain smile at, it would have been more bitter still to accept for certainty the intolerable truth that Winifred had died famished, or that her beloved body was a mangled corpse at the bottom of a cliff. If the reader does not understand this, it is because he finds it impossible to understand a sorrow like mine. I refused to return to Raxton, and took Mrs. Davies's cottage, which was unoccupied, and lived there throughout the autumn. Every day, wet or dry, I used to sally out on the Snowdonian range, just as though she had been lost but yesterday, making inquiries, bribing the good-natured Welsh people (who needed no bribing) to aid me in a search which to them must have seemed monomaniacal.

The peasants and farmers all knew me. 'Sut mae dy galon? (How is thy heart?)' they would say in the beautiful Welsh phrase as I met them. 'How is my heart, indeed!' I would sigh as I went on my way.

Before I went to Wales in search of Winifred I had never set foot in the Principality. Before I left it there was scarcely a Welshman who knew more familiarly than I every mile of the Snowdonian country. Never a trace of Winifred could I find.

At the end of the autumn I left the cottage and removed to Pen y Gwryd, as a comparatively easy point from which I could reach the mountain llyn where I had breakfasted with Winifred on that morning. Afterwards I took up my abode at a fishing-inn, and here I stayed the winter through—scarcely hoping to find her now, yet chained to Snowdon. After my labours during the day, scrambling among slippery boulders and rugged rocks, crossing swollen torrent-beds, amid rain and ice and snow and mist such as frightened away the Welsh themselves—after thus wandering, because I could not leave the region, it was a comfort to me to turn into the low, black-beamed room of the fishing-inn, with drying hams, flitches of bacon, and fishing-rods for decorations, and hear the simple-hearted Cymric folk talking, sometimes in Welsh, sometimes in English, but always with that kindness and that courtesy which go to make the poetry of Welsh common life.

Meantime, I had, as I need scarcely say, spared neither trouble nor expense in advertising for information about Winifred in the Welsh and the West of England newspapers. I offered rewards for her discovery, and the result was merely that I was pestered by letters from people (some of them tourists of education) suggesting traces and clues of so wild, and often of so fantastic a kind, that I arrived at the conviction that of all man's faculties his imagination is the most lawless, and at the same time the most powerful. It was perfectly inconceivable to me that the writers of some of these letters were not themselves demented, so wild or so fanciful were the clues they suggested. Yet. when I came to meet them and talk with them (as I sometimes did), I found these correspondents to be of the ordinary prosaic British type. All my efforts were to no purpose.

Among my longer journeys from the fishing-inn, the most frequent were those to Holywell, near Flint, to the Well of St. Winifred—the reader need not be told why. He will recollect how little Winnie, while plying me with strawberries, had sagely recommended the holy water of this famous well as a 'cure for crutches.' She had actually brought me some of it in a lemonade bottle when she returned to Raxton after her first absence, and had insisted on rubbing my ankle with it. She had, as I afterwards learnt from her father, importuned and at last induced her aunt (evidently a good-natured and worthy soul) to take her to visit a friend at Holywell, a journey of many miles, for the purpose of bringing home with her a bottle of the holy water. Whenever any ascent of the gangways had proved to be more successful than usual, Winifred had attributed the good luck to the virtues contained in her lemonade bottle. Ah! superstition seemed pretty enough then.

At first in the forlorn hope that memory might have attracted her thither, and afterwards because there was a fascination for me in the well on account of its association with her, my pilgrimages to Holywell were as frequent as those of any of the afflicted devotees of the olden time, whose crutches left behind testified to the genuineness of the Saint's pretensions. Into that well Winnie's innocent young eyes had gazed—gazed in the full belief that the holy water would cure me—gazed in the full belief that the crimson stains made by the byssus on the stones were stains left by her martyr-namesake's blood. Where had she stood when she came and looked into the well and the rivulet? On what exact spot had rested her feet—those little rosy feet that on the sea-sands used to flash through the receding foam as she chased the ebbing billows to amuse me, while I sat between my crutches in the cove looking on? It was, I found, possible to gaze in that water till it seemed alive with her—seemed to hold the reflection of the little face which years ago peered anxiously into it for the behoof of the crippled child-lover pining for her at Raxton, and unable to 'get up or down the gangways without her.'

Holywell grew to have a fascination for me, and in the following spring I left the fishing-inn beneath Snowdon, and took rooms in this interesting old town.

VIII

One day, near the rivulet that runs from St. Winifred's Well, I suddenly encountered Sinfi Lovell.

'Sinfi,' I said, 'she's dead, she's surely dead.'

'I tell ye, brother, she ain't got to die!' said Sinfi, as she came and stood beside me. 'Winnie Wynne's on'y got to beg her bread. She's alive.'

'Where is she?' I cried. 'Oh, Sinfi, I shall go mad!'

'There you're too fast for me, brother,' said she, 'when you ask me where she is; but she's alive, and I ain't come quite emp'y-handed of news about her, brother.'

'Oh, tell me!' said I.

'Well,' said Sinfi, 'I've just met one of our people, Euri Lovell, as says that, the very mornin' after we seed her on the hills, he met her close to Carnarvon at break of day.'

'Then she did go to Carnarvon,' I said. 'What a distance for those dear feet!'

'Euri knowed her by sight,' said Sinfi, 'but didn't know about her bein' under the cuss, so he jist let her pass, sayin' to hisself, "She looks jist like a crazy wench this mornin', does Winnie Wynne." Euri was a-goin' through Carnarvon to Bangor, on to Conway and Chester, and never heerd a word about her bein' lost till he got back, six weeks ago.'

'I must go to Carnarvon at once,' said I.

'No use, brother,' said Sinfi. 'If I han't pretty well worked Carnarvon, it's a pity. I've bin there the last three weeks on the patrin-chase, and not a patrin could I find. It's my belief as she never went into Carnarvon town at all, but turned off and went into Llanbeblig churchyard.'

'Why do you think so, Sinfi?'

''Cause her aunt, bein' a Carnarvon woman, was buried among her own kin in Llanbeblig churchyard.

Leastwise, you won't find a ghose of a trace on her at Carnarvon, and it'll be a long kind of a wild-goose chase from here; but if you will go, go you must.'

She could not dissuade me from starting for Carnarvon at once; and, as I would go, she seemed to take it as a matter of course that she must accompany me. Our journey was partly by coach and partly afoot.

My first impulse on nearing Carnarvon was to go—I could not have said why—to Llanbeblig churchyard.

Among a group of graves of the Davieses we easily found that of Winifred's aunt, beneath a newly-planted arbutus tree. After looking at the modest mound for some time, and wondering where Winifred had stood when the coffin was lowered—as I had wondered where she had stood at St. Winifred's Well—I roamed about the churchyard with Sinfi in silence for a time.

At last she said, 'I mind comin' here wonst with Winnie, and I mind her sayin': "There's no place I should so much like to be buried in as Llanbeblig churchyard. The graves of them as die unmarried do look so beautiful."'

'How did she know the graves of those who die unmarried?'

Sinfi looked over the churchyard and waved her hand.

'Wherever you see them beautiful primroses, and them shinin' snowdrops, and them sweet-smellin' vi'lets, that's allus the grave of a child or else of a young Gorgie as died a maid; and wherever you see them laurel trees, and box trees, and 'butus trees, that's the grave of a pusson as ain't nuther child nor maid, an' the Welsh folk think nobody else on'y child'n an' maids ain't quite good enough to be turned into the blessed flowers o' spring.'

'Next to the sea,' I said, 'she loved the flowers of spring.'

'And I should like to be buried here too, brother,' said Sinfi, as we left the churchyard.

'But a fine strong girl like you, Sinfi, is not very likely to die unmarried while there are Romany bachelors about.'

'There ain't a-many Romany chals,' she said, 'as du'st marry Sinfi Lovell, even supposing as Sinfi Lovell 'ud marry them, an' a Gorgio she'll never marry—an' never can marry. And to lay here aneath the flowers o 'spring, wi' the Welsh sun a-shinin' on 'em as it's a-shinin' now, that must be a sweet kind of bed, brother, and for anythink as I knows on, a Romany chi 'ud make as sweet a bed o' vi'lets as the beautifullest Gorgie-wench as wur ever bred in Carnarvon, an' as shinin' a bunch o' snowdrops as ever the Welsh spring knows how to grow.'

At any other time this extraordinary girl's talk would have interested me greatly; now, nothing had any interest for me that did not bear directly upon the fate of Winifred.

Little dreaming how this quiet churchyard had lately been one of the battle-grounds of that all-conquering power (Destiny, or Circumstance?) which had governed Winnie's life and mine, I went with Sinfi into Carnarvon, and made inquiry everywhere, but without the slightest result. This occupied several days, during which time Sinfi stayed with some acquaintances encamped near Carnarvon, while I lodged at a little hotel.

'You don't ask me how you happened to meet me at Holywell, brother,' said she to me, as we stood looking across the water at Carnarvon Castle, over whose mighty battlements the moon was fighting with an army of black, angry clouds, which a wild wind was leading furiously against her—'you don't ask me how you happened to meet me at Holywell, nor how long I've been back agin in dear old Wales, nor what I've been a-doin' on since we parted; but that's nuther here nor there. I'll tell you what I think about Winnie an' the chances o' findin' her, brother, and that'll intrust you more.'

'What is it, Sinfi?' I cried, waking up from the reminiscences, bitter and sweet, the bright moon had conjured up in my mind.

'Well, brother, Winnie, you see, was very fond o' me.'

'She was, and good reason for being fond of you she had.'

'Well, brother, bein' very fond o' me, that made her very fond o' all Romanies; and though she took agin me at fust, arter the cuss, as she took agin you because we was her closest friends (that's what Mr. Blyth said, you know, they allus do), she wouldn't take agin Romanies in general. No, she'd take to Romanies in general, and she'd go hangin' about the different camps, and she'd soon be snapped up, being so comely, and they'd make a lot o' money out on her jist havin' her with 'em for the "dukkerin'."'

'I don't understand you,' I said.

'Well, you know,' said Sinfi, 'anybody as is under the cuss is half with the sperrits and half with us, and so can tell the real "dukkerin'." Only it's bad for a Romany to have another Romany in the "place" as is under the cuss; but it don't matter a bit about having a Gorgio among your breed as is under a cuss; for Gorgio cuss can't never touch Romany.'

'Then you feel quite sure she's not dead, Sinfi?'

'She's jist as live as you an' me somewheres, brother. There's two things as keeps her alive: there's the cuss, as says she's got to beg her bread, and there's the dukkeripen o' the Golden Hand on Snowdon, as says she's got to marry you.'

'But, Sinfi, I mean that, apart from all this superstition of yours, you have reason to think she's alive? and you think she's with the Romanies?'

'I know she's alive, and I think she's with the Romanies. She must be, brother, with the Shaws, or the Lees, or the Stanleys, or the Boswells, or some on 'em.'

'Then,' said I, 'I'll turn Gypsy; I'll be the second Aylwin to own allegiance to the blood of Fenella Stanley. I'll scour Great Britain till I find her.'

'You can jine us if you like, brother. We're goin' all through the West of England with the gries. You're fond o' fishin' an' shootin', brother, an' though you're a Gorgio, you can't help bein' a Gorgio, and you ain't a mumply 'un, as I've said to Jim Burton many's the time; and if you can't give the left-hand body-blow like me, there ain't a-many Gorgios nor yit a-many Romanies as knows better nor you what their fistes wur made for, an' altogether, brother, Beng te tassa mandi if I shouldn't be right-on proud to see ye jine our breed. There's a coachmaker down in Chester, and he's got for sale the beautifullest livin'-waggin in all England. It's shiny orange-yellow with red window-blinds, an' if there's a colour in any rainbow as can't be seed in the panels o' the front door, it's a kind o' rainbow I ain't never seed nowheres. He made it for Jericho Bozzell, the rich Griengro as so often stays at Raxton and at Gypsy Dell; but Rhona Bozzell hates a waggin and allus will sleep in a tent. They do say as the Prince o' Wales wants to buy that livin'-waggin, only he can't spare the balansers just now—his family bein' so big an' times bein' so bad. How much money ha' you got? Can you stan' a hundud an' fifty gold balansers for the waggin besides the fixins?

'Shift,' I said. 'I'm prepared to spend more than that in seeking
Winnie.'

'Dordi, brother, you must be as rich as my dad, an' lie's the richest Griengro arter Jericho Bozzell. You an' me'll jist go down to Chester,' she continued, her eyes sparkling with delight at the prospect of bargaining for the waggon, 'an' we'll fix up sich a livin'-waggin as no Romany rei never had afore.'

'Agreed!' I said, wringing her hand.

'An' now you an' me's right pals,' said Sinfi.

We went to Chester, and I became owner of the famous 'livin'-waggin' coveted (according to Sinfi) by the great personage whom, on account of his name, she always spoke of as a rich, powerful, but mysterious and invisible Welshman. One of the monthly cheese-fairs was going on in the Linen Hall. Among the rows of Welsh carts standing in front of the 'Old Yacht Inn,' Sinfi introduced me to a 'Griengro' (one of the Gypsy Locks of Gloucestershire), of whom I bought a bay mare of extraordinary strength and endurance.

IX

It was, then, to find Winifred that I joined the Gypsies. And yet I will not deny that affinity with the kinsfolk of my ancestress Fenella Stanley must have had something to do with this passage in my eccentric life. That strain of Romany blood which, according to my mother's theory, had much to do with drawing Percy Aylwin and Rhona Boswell together, was alive and potent in my own veins.

But I must pause here to say a few words about Sinfi Lovell. Some of my readers must have already recognised her as a famous character in bohemian circles. Sinfi's father was a 'Griengro,' that is to say, a horse-dealer. She was, indeed, none other than that 'Fiddling Sinfi' who became famous in many parts of England and Wales as a violinist, and also as the only performer on the old Welsh stringed instrument called the 'crwth,' or cruth. Most Gypsies are musical, but Sinfi was a genuine musical genius. Having become, through the good-nature of Winifred's aunt Mrs. Davies, the possessor of a crwth, and having been taught by her the unique capabilities of that rarely seen instrument, she soon learnt the art of fascinating her Welsh patrons by the strange, wild strains she could draw from it. This obsolete six-stringed instrument (with two of the strings reaching beyond the key-board, used as drones and struck by the thumb, the bow only being used on the other four, and a bridge placed, not at right angles to the sides of the instrument, but in an oblique direction), though in some important respects inferior to the violin, is in other respects superior to it. Heard among the peaks of Snowdon, as I heard them during our search for Winifred, the notes of the crwth have a wonderful wildness and pathos. It is supposed to have the power of drawing the spirits when a maiden sings to its accompaniment a mysterious old Cymric song or incantation.

Among her own people it was as a seeress, as an adept in the real dukkering—the dukkering for the Romanies, as distinguished from the false dukkering, the dukkering for the Gorgios—that Sinfi's fame was great. She had travelled over nearly all England—wherever, in short, there were horse-fairs—and was familiar with London, where in the studios of artists she was in request as a face model of extraordinary value. Nor were these all the characteristics that distinguished her from the common herd of Romany chies: she was one of the few Gypsies of either sex who could speak with equal fluency both the English and Welsh Romanes, and she was in the habit sometimes of mixing the two dialects in a most singular way. Though she had lived much in Wales, and had a passionate love of Snowdon, she belonged to a famous branch of the Lovells whose haunt had for ages been in Wales and also the East Midlands, and she had caught entirely the accent of that district.

Among artists in London, as I afterwards learnt, she often went by the playful name of 'Lady Sinfi Lovell,' for the following reason:

She was extremely proud, and believed the 'Kaulo Camloes' to represent the aristocracy not only of the Gypsies, but of the world. Moreover, she had of late been brought into close contact with a certain travelling band of Hungarian Gypsy-musicians, who visited England some time ago. Intercourse with these had fostered her pride in a curious manner. The musicians are the most intelligent and most widely-travelled not only of the Hungarian Gypsies, but of all the Romany race. They are darker than the sátoros czijányok, or tented Gypsies. The Lovells being the darkest of all the Gypsies of Great Britain (and the most handsome, hence called Kaulo Camloes), it was easy to make out an affinity closer than common between the Lovells and the Hungarian musicians. Sinfi heard much talk among the Hungarians of the splendours of the early leaders of the continental Romanies. She was told of Romany kings, dukes, and counts. She accepted, with that entire faith which characterised her, the stories of the exploits of Duke Michael, Duke Andreas, Duke Panuel, and the rest. It only needed a hint from one of her continental friends, that her father, Panuel Lovell, was probably a descendant of Duke Panuel, for Sinfi to consider him a Duke. From that moment she felt as strongly as any Gorgie ever felt the fine sentiment expressed in the phrase, noblesse oblige; and to hear her say, 'I'm a duke's chavi [daughter], and mustn't do so and so,' was a delightful and refreshing experience to me. Poor Panuel groaned under these honours, for Sinfi insisted now on his dressing in a brown velveteen coat, scarlet waistcoat with gold coins for buttons, and the high-crowned, ribbon-bedizened hat which prosperous Gypsies once used to wear. She seemed to consider that her sister Videy (whose tastes were low for a Welsh Gypsy) did not belong to the high aristocracy, though born of the same father and mother. Moreover, 'dook' in Romanes means spirit, ghost, and very likely Sinfi found some power of association in this fact; for Videy was a born sceptic.

One of the special charms of Gypsy life is that a man fully admitted into the Romany brotherhood can be on terms of close intimacy with a Gypsy girl without awaking the smallest suspicion of love-making or flirtation; at least it was so in my time.

Under my father's will, a considerable legacy had come to me, and, after going to London to receive this, I made the circuit of the West of England with Sinfi's people. No sign whatever of Winifred did I find in any of the camps. I was for returning to Wales, where my thoughts always were; but I could not expect Sinfi to leave her family, so I started thither alone, leaving my waggon in their charge. Before I reached Wales, however, I met in the eastern part of Cheshire, not far from Moreton Hall, some English Lees, with whom I got into talk about the Hungarian musicians, who were here then on another flying visit to England. Something that dropped from one of the Lees as to the traditions and superstitions of the Hungarian Gypsies with regard to people suffering from dementia set me thinking; and at last I came to the conclusion that if I really believed Winifred to have taken shelter among the Romanies, it would be absurd not to follow up a band like these Hungarians. Accordingly I changed my course, and followed them up. On coming upon them in a famous English camping-place I found the Lovells and the Boswells. Rhona, dressed in gorgeous attire, evidently purchased at some second-hand shop, was rehearsing the shawl-dance for a great occasion at a neighbouring fair. But no Winifred.

My health was now much impaired by sleeplessness (the inevitable result of my anxiety), and by a narcotic, which from the commencement of my troubles I had been in the habit of taking in ever-increasing doses—a terrible narcotic, one of whose multitudinous effects is that of sending all the patient's thoughts circling around one central idea like planets round the sun. Painful and agonising as had been my suspense,—my oscillation between hope and dread,—during my wanderings with the Lovells, these wanderings had not been without their moments of comfort, for all of which I had been indebted to Sinfi. She would sit with me in an English lane, under a hedge or tree, on a balmy summer evening, or among the primroses, wild hyacinths, buttercups and daisies of the sweet meadows, chattering her reminiscences of Winifred. She would mostly end by saying: 'Winnie was very fond on ye, brother, and we shall find her yit. The Golden Hand on Snowdon wasn't there for nothink. The dukkeripen says you'll marry her yit; a love like yourn can follow the tryenest patrin as ever wur laid.' Then she would play on her crwth and say, 'Ah, brother, I shall be able to make this crwth bring ye a sight o' Winnie's livin' mullo if she's alive, and there ain't a sperrit of the hills as wouldn't answer to it.'

Of Gorgios generally, however, Sinfi had at heart a feeling somewhat akin to dread. I could not understand it.

'Why do you dislike the Gorgios, Sinfi?' I said to her one day on Lake Ogwen, after the return of the Lovells to Wales. We were trout-fishing from a boat anchored to a heavy block of granite which she had fastened to a rope and heaved overboard with a strength that would have surpassed that of most Englishwomen.

'That's nuther here nor there, brother,' she replied mysteriously. So months and months dragged by, and brought no trace of Winifred.

IV

THE LEADER OF THE AYLWINIANS

I

One day as Sinfi and I were strolling through the lovely glades between Capel Curig and Bettws y Coed, on our way to a fishing-place, we sat down by a stream to eat some bread and cheese we had brought with us.

The sunlight, as it broke here and there between the thick foliage, was playing upon the little cascades in such magical fashion—turning the water into a torrent that seemed as though molten rubies and sapphires and opals were ablaze in one dancing faery stream,—that even the dark tragedy of human life seemed enveloped for a moment in an atmosphere of poetry and beauty. Sinfi gazed at it silently, then she said:

'This is the very place where Winnie wonst tried to save a hernshaw as wur wounded. She wur tryin' to ketch hold on it, as the water wur carryin' it along, and he pretty nigh beat her to death wi' his wings for her pains. It wur then as she come an' stayed along o' us for a bit, an' she got to be as fond o' my crwth as you be's, an' she used to say that if there wur any music as 'ud draw her sperrit hack to the airth arter she wur dead it 'ud be the sound o' my crwth; but there she wur wrong as wrong could be: Romany music couldn't never touch Gorgio sperrit; 'tain't a bit likely. But it can draw her livin' mullo [wraith].' And as she spoke she began to play her crwth pizzicato and to sing the opening bars of the old Welsh incantation which I had heard on Snowdon on that never-to-be-forgotten morning.

This, as usual, sent my mind at once back to the picture of Fenella Stanley calling round her by the aid of her music the spirits of Snowdon. And then a strange hallucination came upon me, that made me clutch at Sinfi's arm. Close by her, reflected in a little glassy pool divided off from the current by a ring of stones, two blue eyes seemed gazing. Then the face and the entire figure of Winifred appeared, but Winifred dressed as a beggar girl in rags, Winifred standing at a street corner holding out matches for sale.

'Winifred!' I exclaimed; and then the hallucination passed, and Sinfi's features were reflected in the water. My exclamation had the strangest effect upon Sinfi. Her lips, which usually wore a peculiarly proud and fearless curve, quivered, and were losing the brilliant rosebud redness which mostly characterised them. The little blue tattoo rosettes at the corners of her mouth seemed to be growing more distinct as she gazed in the water through eyes dark and mysterious as Night's, but, like Night's own eyes, ready, I thought, to call up the throbbing fires of a million stars.

'What made you cry out "Winifred"?' she said, as the music ceased.

'What you told me about the spirits following the crwth was causing the strangest dream,' I answered. 'I thought I saw Winnie's face reflected in the water, and I thought she was in awful distress. And all the time it was your face.'

'That wur her livin' mullo,' said Sinfi solemnly.

Convinced though I was that the hallucination was the natural result of Sinfi's harping upon the literal fulfilment of the curse, it depressed me greatly.

Close to this beautiful spot we came suddenly upon two tourists sketching. And now occurred one of those surprises of which I have found that real life is far more full than any fiction dares to be. As we passed the artists, I heard one call out to the other, with a 'burr' which I will not attempt to render, having never lived in the 'Black Country':

'You have a true eye for composition; what do you think of this tree?'

The speaker's remarkable appearance attracted my attention.

'Well,' said I to Sinfi, 'that's the first time I ever saw a painter shaven and dressed in a coat like a Quaker's.'

Sinfi looked across at the speaker through the curling smoke from my pipe, gave a start of surprise, and then said: 'So you've never seed him? That's because you're a country Johnny, brother, and don't know nothink about Londra life. That's a friend o' mine from Londra as has painted me many's the time.'

'Painted you?' I said; 'the man in black, with the goggle eyes, squatting there under the white umbrella? What's his name?'

'That's the cel'erated Mr. Wilderspin, an' he's painted me many's the time, an' a rare rum 'un he is too. Dordi! it makes me laugh to think on him. Most Gorgios is mad, more or less, but he's the maddest 'un I ever know'd.'

We had by this time got close to the painter's companion, who, sitting upright on his camp-stool, was busy with his brush. Without shifting his head to look at us, or removing his eyes from his work, he said, in a voice of striking power and volume: 'Nothing but an imperfect experience of life, Lady Sinfi, could have made you pronounce our friend there to be the maddest Gorgio living.'

'Dordi!' exclaimed Sinfi, turning sharply round in great astonishment. 'Fancy seein' both on 'em here!'

'Mad our friend is, no doubt, Lady Sinfi,' said the painter, without looking round, 'but not so mad as certain illustrious Gorgios I could name, some of them born legislators and some of them (apparently) born. R.A.'s.'

'Who should ha' thought of seein' 'em both here?' said Sinfi again.

'That,' said the painter, without even yet turning to look at us or staying the movement of his brush, 'is a remark I never make in a little dot of a world like this, Lady Sinfi, where I expect to see everybody everywhere. But, my dear Romany chi,' he continued, now turning slowly round, 'in passing your strictures upon the Gorgio world, you should remember that you belong to a very limited aristocracy, and that your remarks may probably fall upon ears of an entirely inferior and Gorgio convolution.'

'No offence, I hope.' said Sinfi.

'Offence in calling the Gorgios mad? Not the smallest, save that you have distinctly plagiarised from me in your classification of the Gorgio race.'

His companion called out again. 'Just one moment! Do come and look at the position of this tree.'

'In a second, Wilderspin, in a second,' said the other. 'An old friend and myself are in the midst of a discussion.'

'A discussion!' said the person addressed as Wilderspin. 'And with whom, pray?'

'With Lady Sinfi Lovell,—a discussion as to the exact value of your own special kind of madness in relation to the tomfooleries of the Gorgio mind in general.'

'Kekka! kekka!' said Sinfi, 'you shouldn't have said that.'

'And I was on the point of proving to her ladyship that in these days, when Art has become genteel, and even New Grub Street "decorates" her walls—when success means not so much painting fine pictures as building fine houses to paint in—the greatest compliment you can pay to a man of genius is surely to call him either a beggar or a madman.'

The peculiarity of this 'chaff' was that it was uttered in a simple and serious tone, in which not the faintest tinge of ironical intent was apparent. The other artist looked across and said: 'Dear me! Sinfi Lovell! I am pleased to see you, Sinfi. I will ask you for a sitting to-morrow. A study of your head would be very suggestive among the Welsh hills.'

The man who had been 'chaffing' Sinfi then rose and walked towards his Quaker-like companion, and I had an opportunity of observing him fully. I saw that he was a spare man, wearing a brown velvet coat and a dark felt hat. The collar of the coat seemed to have been made carefully larger than usual, in order to increase the apparent width of his chest. His hair was brown and curly, but close cut. His features were regular, perhaps handsome. His complexion was bright,—fair almost,—rosy in hue, and his eyes were brown.

He shook hands with Sinfi as he passed us, and gave me a glance of that rapid and all-comprehending kind which seems to take in, at once, a picture in its every detail.

'What do you think of him?' said Sinfi to me, as he passed on and we two sat down on the grass by the side of the stream.

'I am puzzled,' I replied, 'to know whether he is a young man who looks like a middle-aged one, or a middle-aged man who looks like a young one. How's his hair under the hat?'

'Thinnish atop,' said Sinfi laconically. 'And I'm puzzled,' I added, still looking at him as he walked over the grass, 'as to whether he's a little man who looks middle-sized, or a middle-sized man who looks little.'

'He's a little big 'un,' said Sinfi; 'about the height o' Rhona
Bozzell's Tarno Rye.'

'Altogether he puzzles me, Sinfi!'

'He puzzled me same way at fust.'

What was it that made me take an interest so strange, strong, and sudden in this man? Without a hint of hair upon his face, while juvenile curls clustered thick and short beneath his wide-awake, he had at first struck me as being not much more than a lad, till, as he gave me that rapid, searching glance in passing, I perceived the little crow's-feet round his eyes, and he then struck me immediately as being probably on the verge of thirty-five. His figure was slim and thin, his waist almost girlish in its fall. I should have considered him small had not the unusually deep, loud, manly, and sonorous voice with which he had accosted Sinfi conveyed an impression of size and weight such as even big men do not often produce. This deep voice, coupled with that gaunt kind of cheek which we associate with the most demure people, produced an effect of sedateness such as I should have expected to find (and did not find) in the other man—the man of the shaven cheek and Quaker costume; but, in the one glance I had got from those watchful, sagacious, twinkling eyes, there was an expression quite peculiar to them, quite inscrutable, quite indescribable.

II

'Can you reckon him up, brother?' said Sinfi, taking my meerschaum from my lips to refill it for me, as she was fond of doing.

'No.'

'Nor I nuther,' said Sinfi. 'Nor I can't pen his dukkerin' nuther, though often's the time I've tried it.'

During this time the two friends seemed to have finished their colloquy upon 'composition'; for they both came up to us. Sinfi rose; I sat still on the grass, smoking my pipe, listening to the chatter of the water as it rushed over the rocks. By this time my curiosity in the younger man had died away. My mind was occupied with the dream-picture of a little blue-eyed girl struggling with a wounded heron. I had noticed, however, that he of the piercing eyes did not look at me again, having entirely exhausted at a glance such interest as I had momentarily afforded him; while his companion seemed quite unconscious of my presence as he stood there, his large, full, deep, brown eyes gazing apparently at something over my head, a long way off. Also I had noticed that 'Visionary' was stamped upon this man's every feature—that he seemed an inspired baby of forty, talking there to his companion and to Sinfi, the sun falling upon his long, brown, curly hair, mixed with grey, which fell from beneath his hat, and floated around his collar like a mane.

When my reverie had passed, I found the artists trying to arrange with Sinfi to give an open-air sitting to one of them, the man addressed as Wilderspin. Sinfi seemed willing enough to come to terms; but I saw her look round at me as if saying to herself, 'What am I to do with you?'

'I should like for my brother to sit too,' I heard her say.

'Surely!' said Wilderspin. 'Your brother would be a great gain to my picture.'

Sinfi then came to me, and said that the painter wanted me to sit to him.

'But,' said I in an undertone, 'the Gorgios will certainly find out that I am no Romany.'

'Not they,' said Sinfi, 'the Gorgios is sich fools. Why, bless you, a
Gorgio ain't got eves and ears like a Romany. You don't suppose as a
Gorgio can hear or see or smell like a Romany can?'

'But you forget, Sinfi, that I am a Gorgio, and there are not many
Romanies can boast of better senses than your brother Hal.'

'Dordi!' said Sinfi, 'that's jist like your mock-modesty. Your great-grandmother wur a Romany, and it's my belief that if you only went back fur enough, you'd find you had jist as good Romany blood in your veins as I have, and my daddy is a duke, you know, a real, reg'lar, out-an'-out Romany duke.'

'I'm afraid you flatter me, sister,' I replied. 'However, let's try the Gorgios;' and I got up and walked with her close to the two sketchers.

Wilderspin was on the point of engaging me, when the other man, without troubling to look at me again, said:

'He's no more a Romany than I am.'

'Ain't a Romany?' said Sinfi. 'Who says my brother ain't a Romany? Where did you ever see a Gorgio with a skin like that?' she said, triumphantly pulling up my sleeve and exposing one of my wrists. 'That ain't sunburn, that's the real Romany brown, an' we's twinses, only I'm the biggest, an' we's the child'n of a duke, a real, reg'lar, out-an'-out Romany duke.'

He gave a glance at the exposed wrist.

'As to the Romany brown,' said he, 'a little soap would often make a change in the best Romany brown—ducal or other.'

'Why, look at his neck,' said Sinfi, turning down my neckerchief; 'is that sunburn, or is it Romany brown, I should like to know?'

'I assure you,' said the speaker, still addressing her in the same grave, measured voice, 'that the Romanies have no idea what a little soap can do with the Romany brown.'

'Do you mean to say,' cried Sinfi, now entirely losing her temper (for on the subject of Romany cleanliness she, the most cleanly of women, was keenly sensitive)—'do you mean to say as the Romany dials an' the Romany dries don't wash theirselves? I know what you fine Gorgios do say,—you're allus a-tellin' lies about us Romanies. Brother,' she cried, turning now to me in a great fury, 'I'm a duke's chavi, an' mustn't fight no mumply Gorgios; why don't you take an' make his bed for him?'

And certainly the man's supercilious impertinence was beginning to irritate me.

'I should advise you to withdraw that about the soap,' I said quietly, looking at him.

'Oh! and if I don't?'

'Why, then I suppose I must do as my sister bids,' said I. 'I must make your bed,' pointing to the grass beneath his feet. 'But I think it only fair to tell you that I am somewhat of a fighting man, which you probably are not.'

'You mean…?' said he (turning round menacingly, but with no more notion of how to use his fists than a lobster).

'I mean that we should not be fighting on equal terms,' I said.

'In other words,' said he, 'you mean…?' and he came nearer.

'In other words, I mean that, judging from the way in which you are advancing towards me now, the result of such an encounter might not tend to the honour and glory of the British artist in Wales.'

'But,' said he, 'you are no Gypsy. Who are you?'

'My name is Henry Aylwin,' said I; 'and I must ask you to withdraw your words about the virtues of soap, as my sister objects to them.'

'What?' cried he, losing for the first time his matchless sang-froid. 'Henry Aylwin?' Then he looked at me in silent amazement, while an expression of the deepest humorous enjoyment overspread his features, making them positively shine as though oiled. Finally, he burst into a loud laugh, that was all the more irritating from the manifest effort he made to restrain it.

'Did I hear His Majesty of Gypsydom aright?' he said, as soon as his hilarity allowed him to speak. 'Is the humble bed of a mere painter to be made for him by the representative of the proud Aylwins, the genteel Aylwins, the heir-presumptive Aylwins—the most respectable branch of a most respectable family, which, alas! has its ungenteel, its bohemian, its vulgar offshoots? Did I hear His Majesty of Gypsydom aright?'

He leant against a tree, and gave utterance to peal after peal of laughter.

I advanced with rapidly rising anger, but his hilarity had so overmastered him that he did not heed it.

'Wilderspin,' cried he, 'come here! Pray come here. Have I not often told you the reason why I threw up my engagement with my theatrical manager, and missed my high vocation in ungenteel comedy? Have I not often told you that it sprang from no disrespect to my friends, the comic actors, but from the feeling that no comedian can hope to be comic enough to compete with the real thing—the true harlequinade of everyday life, roaring and screaming around me wherever I go?'

Then, without waiting for his companion's reply, he turned to me, and giving an added volume to his sonorous voice, said:

'And you, Sir King, do you know whose bed Your Majesty was going to make at the bidding of—well, of a duke's chavi?'

I advanced with still growing anger. 'Stay, King Bamfylde, stay,' said he; 'shall the beds of the mere ungenteel Aylwins, "the outside Aylwins," be made by the high Gypsy-gentility of Raxton?'

A light began to break in upon me. 'Surely,' I said, 'surely you are not Cyril Aylwin, the———?'

'Pray finish your sentence, sir, and say the low bohemian painter, the representative of the great ungenteel—the successor to the Aylwin peerage.'

The other painter, looking in blank amazement at my newly-found kinsman's extraordinary merriment, exclaimed, 'Bless me! Then you really can laugh aloud, Mr. Cyril. What has happened? What can have happened to make my dear friend laugh aloud?'

'Well he may ask,' said Cyril, turning to me. 'He knows that ever since I was a boy in jackets I have despised the man who, in a world where all is so comic, could select any particular point of the farce for his empty guffaw. But I am conquered at last. Let me introduce you, Wilderspin, to my kinsman, Henry Aylwin of Raxton Hall, alias Lord Henry Lovell of Little Egypt—one of Duke Panuel's interesting twinses.'

But Wilderspin's astonishment, apparently, was not at the rencontre: it was at the spectacle of his companion's hilarity. 'Wonderful!' he murmured, with his eyes still fastened upon Cyril. 'My dear friend can laugh aloud. Most wonderful! What can have happened?'

This is what had happened. By one of those strange coincidences which make the drama of real life far more wonderful than the drama of any stage, I, in my character of wandering Gypsy, had been thrown across the path of the bête noire of my mother and aunt, Cyril Aylwin, a painter of bohemian proclivities, who (under the name of 'Cyril') had obtained some considerable reputation. This kinsman of mine had been held up to me as a warning from my very childhood, though wherein lay his delinquencies I never did clearly understand, save that he had once been an actor—before acting had become genteel. Often as I had heard of this eccentric painter as the representative of the branch of the family which preceded mine in the succession to the coveted earldom, I had never seen him before.

He stood and looked at me in a state of intense amusement, but did not speak.

'So you are Cyril Aylwin?' I said. 'Still you must withdraw what you said to my sister about the soap.'

'Delicious!' said he, grasping my hand. 'I had no idea that high gentility numbered chivalry among its virtues. Lady Sinfi,' he continued, turning to her, 'they say this brother of yours is a character, and, by Jove! he is. And as to you, dear lady, I am proud of the family connection. The man who has two Romany Rye kinsmen may be excused for showing a little pride. I withdraw every word about the virtues of soap, and am convinced that it can do nothing with the true Romany-Aylwin brown.'

On that we shook hands all round. 'But, Sinfi,' said I, 'why did you not tell me that this was my kinsman?'

''Cause I didn't know,' said she. 'I han't never seed him since I've know'd you. I always heerd his friends call him Cyril, and so I used to call him Mr. Cyril.'

'But, Lady Sinfi, my Helen of Little Egypt,' said Cyril, 'suppose that in my encounter with my patrician cousin—an encounter which would have been entirely got up in honour of you—suppose it had happened that I had made your brother's bed for him?'

'You make his bed!' exclaimed Sinfi, laughing.

'Dordi! how you would ha' went down afore the Swimmin' Rei!'
[Footnote]

[Footnote: By the Welsh Gypsies, but few of whom can swim, I was called 'the Swimmin' Rei,' a name which would have been far more appropriately given to Percy Aylwin (Rhona Boswell's lover), one of the strongest swimmers in England; but he was simply called the Tarno Rye (the young gentleman).]

'But suppose that, on the contrary, he had gone down before me,' said Cyril; 'suppose I had been the death of your Swimming Rei, I should have been tried for the wilful murder of a prince of Little Egypt, the son of a Romany duke. Why, Helen of Troy was not half so mischievous a beauty as you.'

'You was safe enough, no fear,' said Sinfi. 'It 'ud take six o' you to settle the Swimmin' Rei.'

I found that Cyril and his strange companion were staying at 'The Royal Oak,' at Bettws y Coed. They asked me to join them, but when I told them I 'could not leave my people, who were encamped about two miles off,' Cyril again looked at me with an expression of deepest enjoyment, and exclaimed 'delightful creature.'

Turning to Sinfi, he said: 'Then we'll go with you and call upon the noble father of the twins, my old friend King Panuel.'

'He ain't a king,' said Sinfi modestly; 'he's only a duke.'

'You'll give us some tea, Lady Sinfi?' said Cyril.

'No tea equal to Gypsy tea.'

'Romany tea, Mr. Cyril,' replied Sinfi, with perfect dignity and grace. 'My daddy, the duke, will be pleased to welcome you.'

We all strolled towards the tents. I offered to carry an umbrella and a camp-stool. Cyril walked briskly away with Sinfi, leaving me to get on with Wilderspin as best I could. Before the other two were out of earshot, however, I heard Cyril say,

'You shouldn't have taken so seriously my chaff about the soap, Sinfi. You ought to know me better by this time than to think that I would really insult you.'

'How you would ha' went down afore the Swimmin' Rei!' replied Sinfi regretfully.

III

Between my new companion, Wilderspin, and myself there was an awkward silence for some time. He was evidently in a brown study. I had ample opportunity for examining his face. Deeply impressed upon his forehead there was, as I now perceived, an ancient scar of a peculiar shape. At last, a lovely bit of scenery broke the spell, and conversation began to flow freely.

We had nearly got within sight of the encampment when he said,

'I am in some perplexity, sir, about the various branches of your family. Aylwin, I need not tell you, was the name of the greatest man of this age, and I am anxious to know what is exactly your connection with him.'

'You surprise me,' I said. 'Out of our own family, in its various branches, there is, I have been told, no very large number of Aylwins, and I had no idea that one of them had become famous.'

'I did not say famous, sir, but great; two very different words. Yet, in a certain deep sense, it may be said of Philip Aylwin's name that since his lamented death it has even become famous. The Aylwinians (of which body I am, as you are no doubt aware, founder and president) are, I may say, becoming—'

'Philip Aylwin!' I said. 'Why, that was my father. He famous!'

The recollection of the essay upon 'Hamalet and Hamlet,' the thought of the brass-rubbings, the kneecaps and mittens, came before me in an irresistibly humorous light, and I could not repress a smile. Then arose upon me the remembrance of the misery that had fallen upon Winnie and myself from his monomania and what seemed to me his superstitious folly, and I could not withhold an angry scowl. Then came the picture of the poor scarred breast, the love-token, and the martyrdom that came to him who had too deeply loved, and smile and frown both passed from my face as I murmured,—'Poor father! he famous!

'Philip Aylwin's son!' said Wilderspin, staring at me. Then, raising his hat as reverentially to me as if I had been the son of Shakespeare himself, he said, 'Mr. Aylwin, since Mary Wilderspin went home to heaven, the one great event of my life has been the reading of The Veiled Queen, your father's book of inspired wisdom upon the modern Renascence of Wonder in the mind of Man. To apply his principles to Art, sir—to give artistic rendering to the profound idea hinted at in the marvellous vignette on the title-page of his third edition—has been, for some time past, the proud task of my life. And you are the great man's son! Astonishing! Although his great learning overwhelms my mind and appals my soul (whom, indeed, should it not overwhelm and appal?) there is not a pamphlet of his that I do not know intimately, almost by heart.'

'Including the paper on "Hamlet and Hamalet, and the wide region of
Nowhere"?'

'Including that and everything.'

'Did you know him, Mr. Wilderspin?'

'Not in the flesh; in the spirit, who knows him so well? Your mother I have had the pleasure of meeting at the house of Lord Sleaford, and indeed I have had the distinguished honour of painting her portrait; but the great author of The Veiled Queen—the inspired designer of the vignette symbolical of the Renascence of Wonder in Art—I never had the rapture of seeing. This very day, the anniversary of his birth,' he continued, 'is a great day in the Aylwinian calendar.'

'My father's birthday? Why, so it is!'

'Mr. Aylwin, is it possible that the anniversary of a day so momentous for the world is forgotten—forgotten by the very issue of the great man's loins?'

'The fact is,' said I, in some confusion, 'I have been living with the Gypsies, and, you see, Mr. Wilderspin, the passage of time—'

'The son of Philip Aylwin a Gypsy!' murmured Wilderspin meditatively, and unconscious evidently that he was speaking aloud—'a Gypsy! Still it would surely be a mistake to suppose,' he continued, perfectly oblivious now of my presence, 'that the vagaries of his son can really bring shame upon the head of the father.'

'But, by God!' I cried, 'it is no mistake that the vagaries of the father can bring shame and sorrow and misery upon the child. I could name a couple of fathers—sleeping very close to each other now—whose vagaries—'

My sudden anger was carrying me away; but I stopped, recollecting myself.

'Doubtless,' said Wilderspin, 'there are fathers and fathers. The son of Philip Aylwin has assuredly a right to be critical in regard to all other fathers than his own.'

I looked in his face; the expression of solemn earnestness was quite unmistakable.

'It is not you,' I said, 'it is Heaven, or else it is the blind jester Circumstance, that is playing this joke upon me!'

'To your honoured father,' he continued, taking not the slightest notice of my interjection, 'I owe everything. From his grave he supports my soul; from his grave he gives me ideas; from his grave he makes my fame. How should I fail to honour his son, even though he—'

Of course he was going to add—'even though he be a vagabond associating with vagabonds,'—but he left the sentence unfinished.

'I confess, Mr. Wilderspin,' said I, 'that you speak in such enigmas that it would be folly for me to attempt to answer you.'

'I wish,' said Wilderspin, 'that all enigmas were as soluble as this. Let me ask you a question, sir. When you stood before my picture, "Faith and Love," in Bond Street, did you not perceive that both it and the predella were inspired entirely by your father's great work, The Veiled Queen, or rather that they are mere pictorial renderings and illustrations of that grand effort of man's soul in its loftiest development?'

I had never heard of the picture in question. As for the book, my father, perceiving my great dislike of mysticism, had always shrunk from showing me any effusion of his that was not of a simply antiquarian kind. In Switzerland, however, after his death, while waiting for the embalmer to finish his work, I had become, during a few days' reading, acquainted with The Veiled Queen. It was a new edition containing an 'added chapter,' full of subtle spiritualistic symbols. Amid what had seemed to me mere mystical jargon about the veil of Isis being uplifted, not by Man's reason, not by such researches as those of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and the continental evolutionists, but by Faith and Love, I had come across passages of burning eloquence.

'I am sorry to say,' I replied, 'that my Gypsy wanderings are again answerable for my shortcomings. I have not yet seen your picture. When I do see it I—'

'Not seen "Faith and Love" and the equally wonderful predella at the foot of it!' he exclaimed incredulously. 'Ah, but you have been living among the Gypsies. It is the greatest picture of the modern world; for, Mr. Aylwin, it renders in Art the inevitable attitude of its own time and country towards the unseen world, and renders it as completely as did the masterpiece of Polygnotus in the Lesche of the 'Not in the flesh; in the spirit, who knows him so well? Your mother I have had the pleasure of meeting at the house of Lord Sleaford, and indeed I have had the distinguished honour of painting her portrait; but the great author of The Veiled Queen—the inspired designer of the vignette symbolical of the Renascence of Wonder in Art—I never had the rapture of seeing. This very day, the anniversary of his birth,' he continued, 'is a great day in the Aylwinian calendar.'

'My father's birthday? Why, so it is!'

'Mr. Aylwin, is it possible that the anniversary of a day so momentous for the world is forgotten—forgotten by the very issue of the great man's loins?'

'The fact is,' said I, in some confusion, 'I have been living with the Gypsies, and, you see, Mr. Wilderspin, the passage of time—'

'The son of Philip Aylwin a Gypsy!' murmured Wilderspin meditatively, and unconscious evidently that he was speaking aloud—'a Gypsy! Still it would surely be a mistake to suppose,' he continued, perfectly oblivious now of my presence, 'that the vagaries of his son can really bring shame upon the head of the father.'

'But, by God!' I cried, 'it is no mistake that the vagaries of the father can bring shame and sorrow and misery upon the child. I could name a couple of fathers—sleeping very close to each other now—whose vagaries—'

My sudden anger was carrying me away; but I stopped, recollecting myself.

'Doubtless,' said Wilderspin, 'there are fathers and fathers. The son of Philip Aylwin has assuredly a right to be critical in regard to all other fathers than his own.'

I looked in his face; the expression of solemn earnestness was quite unmistakable.

'It is not you,' I said, 'it is Heaven, or else it is the blind jester Circumstance, that is playing this joke upon me!'

'To your honoured father,' he continued, taking not the slightest notice of my interjection, 'I owe everything. From his grave he supports my soul; from his grave he gives me ideas; from his grave he makes my fame. How should I fail to honour his son, even though he—'

Of course he was going to add—'even though he be a vagabond associating with vagabonds,'—but he left the sentence unfinished.

'I confess, Mr. Wilderspin,' said I, 'that you speak in such enigmas that it would be folly for me to attempt to answer you.'

'I wish,' said Wilderspin, 'that all enigmas were as soluble as this. Let me ask you a question, sir. When you stood before my picture, "Faith and Love," in Bond Street, did you not perceive that both it and the predella were inspired entirely by your father's great work, The Veiled Queen, or rather that they are mere pictorial renderings and illustrations of that grand effort of man's soul in its loftiest development?'

I had never heard of the picture in question. As for the book, my father, perceiving my great dislike of mysticism, had always shrunk from showing me any effusion of his that was not of a simply antiquarian kind. In Switzerland, however, after his death, while waiting for the embalmer to finish his work, I had become, during a few days' reading, acquainted with The Veiled Queen. It was a new edition containing an 'added chapter,' full of subtle spiritualistic symbols. Amid what had seemed to me mere mystical jargon about the veil of Isis being uplifted, not by Man's reason, not by such researches as those of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and the continental evolutionists, but by Faith and Love, I had come across passages of burning eloquence.

'I am sorry to say,' I replied, 'that my Gypsy wanderings are again answerable for my shortcomings. I have not yet seen your picture. When I do see it I—'

'Not seen "Faith and Love" and the equally wonderful predella at the foot of it!' he exclaimed incredulously. 'Ah, but you have been living among the Gypsies. It is the greatest picture of the modern world; for, Mr. Aylwin, it renders in Art the inevitable attitude of its own time and country towards the unseen world, and renders it as completely as did the masterpiece of Polygnotus in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi—as completely as did the wonderful frescoes of Andrea Orcagna on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa.'

'And you attribute your success to the inspiration you derived from my father's hook?'

'To that and to the spirit of Mary Wilderspin in heaven.'

'Then you are a Spiritualist?'

'I am an Aylwinian, the opposite (need I say?) of a Darwinian.'

'Of the school of Blake, perhaps?' I asked.

'Of the school of Blake? No. He was on the right road; but he was a writer of verses! Art is a jealous mistress, Mr. Aylwin: the painter who rhymes is lost. Even the master himself is so much the weaker by every verse he has written. I never could make a rhyme in my life, and have faithfully shunned printer's ink, the black blight of the painter. I am my own school; the school of the spirit world.'

'I am very curious,' I said, 'to know in what way my father and the spirits can have inspired a great painter. Of the vignette I may claim to know something. Of the spirits as artists I have of course no knowledge, but as regards my father, he, I am certain, could hardly have told a Raphael from a chromolithograph copy. He was, in spite of that same vignette, most ignorant of art. Raxton Hall possesses nothing but family portraits.'

IV

By this time we had reached the encampment, which was close by a waterfall among ferns and wild-flowers. Little Jerry Lovell, a child of about four years of age, came running to meet me with a dead water-wagtail in his hand which he had knocked down.

'Me kill de Romany Chiriklo,' said he, and then proceeded to tell me very gravely that, having killed the 'Gypsy magpie,' he was bound to have a great lady for his sweetheart.

'Jerry,' said I bitterly, 'you begin with love and superstition early; you are an incipient "Aylwinian": take care.'

When I explained to Wilderspin that this was one of the Romany beliefs, he said that he did not at present see the connection between a dead water-wagtail and a live lady, but that such a connection might doubtless exist. Panuel Lovell now came forward to greet and welcome Wilderspin. Sinfi and Cyril had evidently walked at a brisk rate, for already tea was spread out on a cloth. The fire was blazing beneath a kettle slung from the 'kettle-prop.' The party were waiting for us. Sinfi, however, never idle, was filling up the time by giving lessons in riding to Euri and Sylvester Lovell, two dusky urchins in their early teens, while her favourite bantam-cock Pharaoh, standing on a donkey's back, his wattles gleaming like coral in the sun, was crowing lustily. Cyril, who lay stretched among the ferns, his chin resting in his hands and a cigarette in his mouth, was looking on with the deepest interest. As I passed behind him to introduce Wilderspin to Videy Lovell (who was making tea), I heard Cyril say, 'Lady Sinfi, you must and shall teach me how to make an adversary's bed—the only really essential part of a liberal education.'

'Brother,' said Sinfi, turning to me, 'your thoughts are a-flyin' off agin; keep your spirits up afore all these.'

The leafy dingle was recalling Graylingham Wilderness and 'Fairy
Dell,' where little Winifred used to play Titania to my childish
Oberon, and dance the Gypsy 'shawl-dance' Sinfi's mother had taught
her!

So much was I occupied with these reminiscences that I had not observed that during our absence our camp had been honoured by visitors. These were Jericho Boswell, christened, I believe, Jasper, his daughter Rhona, and James Herne, called on account of his accomplishments as a penman the Scollard. Although Jasper Boswell and Panuel Lovell were rival Griengroes, there was no jealousy between them—indeed, they were excellent friends.

There were many points of similarity between their characters. Each had risen from comparative poverty to what might be called wealth, and risen in the same way, that is to say, by straightforward dealing with the Gorgios, although as regarded Jericho, Rhona was generally credited with having acted as a great auxiliary in amassing his wealth. All over the country the farmers and horse-dealers knew that neither Jasper nor Panuel ever bishoped a gry, or indulged in any other horse-dealing tricks. Their very simplicity of character had done what all the crafty tricks of certain compeers of theirs had failed to do. They were also very much alike in their good-natured and humorous, way of taking all the ups and downs of life.

A very different kind of Romany was the Scollard—so different, indeed, that it was hard to think that he was of the same race: Romany guile incarnate was the Scollard. He suggested even in his personal appearance the typical Gypsy of the novel and the stage, rather than the true Gypsy as he lives and moves. The Scollard was well known to be half-crazed with a passion for Rhona Boswell, who was the fiancée of that cousin of mine, Percy Aylwin, before mentioned. Percy was considered to be a hopelessly erratic character. Much against the wish of his parents, he had been brought up as a sailor; but on seeing Rhona Boswell he promptly fell in love with her, and quitted the sea in order to be near her. And no man who ever heard Rhona's laugh professed to wonder at Percy's infatuation. As a Griengro her father, Jericho Boswell, who had no son, was said to have owed his prosperity to Rhona's instinctive knowledge of horseflesh.

While our guests, Romany and Gorgio, were doing justice to the trout, Welsh brown bread and butter and jam which Videy had spread before them, Sinfi went to the back of the camp to look at the ponies, and I got into conversation with Rhona Boswell, whom I remembered so well as a child. At first she was shy and embarrassed, doubtful, as I perceived, whether or not she ought to talk about Winnie. She waited to see whether I introduced the subject, and finding that I did not, she began to talk about Sinfi and plied me with questions as to what we two had been doing and where we had been during our wanderings through Wales.

When tea was over and Cyril was in lively talk with Sinfi, Wilderspin grew restless, and I perceived that he wanted to resume his conversation with me about his picture. I said to him: 'This idea o f my father's which has inspired you, and resulted in such great work, what is its nature?'

'I am a painter, Mr. Aylwin, and nothing more,' he replied. 'I could only express Philip Aylwin's ideas by describing my picture and the predella beneath it. Will you permit me to do so?'

'May I ask you,' I said, 'as a favour to do so?'

Immediately his face became very bright, and into his eyes returned the far-off look already described.

'I will first take the predella, which represents Isis behind the
Veil,' said he. 'Imagine yourself thousands of years away from this
time. Imagine yourself thousands of miles away, among real
Egyptians.'

'Real 'Gyptians!' cried Sinfi. 'Who says the Romanies ain't real 'Gyptians? Anybody as says my daddy ain't a real 'Gyptian duke'll ha' to set to with Sinfi Lovell.'

'Nonsense,' said Cyril, smiling, and playing idly with a coral amulet dangling from Sinfi's neck; 'he's talking about the ancient Egyptians: Egyptian mummies, you silly Lady Sinfi. You're not a mummy, are you?'

'Well, no, I ain't a mummy as fur as I knows on,' said Sinfi, only half-appeased; 'but my daddy's a 'Gyptian duke for all that,—ain't you, dad?'

'So it seems, Sin,' said Panuel, 'but I ommust begin to wish I worn't; it makes you feel so blazin' shy bein' a duke all of a suddent.'

'Dabla!' said the guest Jericho Boswell. 'What, Pan, has she made a dook on ye?'

The Scollard began to grin.

'Pull that ugly mug o' yourn straight, Jim Herne,' said Sinfi, 'else
I'll come and pull it straight for you.'

Wilderspin took no notice of the interruption, but addressed me as though no one else were within earshot.

'Imagine yourself standing in an Egyptian city, where innumerable lamps of every hue are shining. It is one of the great lamp-fêtes of Sais, which all Egypt has come to see. There, in honour of the feast, sits a tall woman, covered by a veil. But the painting is so wonderful, Mr. Aylwin, that, though you see a woman's face expressed behind the veil—though you see the warm flesh-tints and the light of the eyes through the aerial film—you cannot judge of the character of the face—you cannot see whether it is that of woman in her noblest, or woman in her basest, type. The eyes sparkle, but you cannot say whether they sparkle with malignity or benevolence—whether they are fired with what Philip Aylwin calls "the love-light of the seventh heaven," or are threatening with "the hungry flames of the seventh hell"! There she sits in front of a portico, while, asleep, with folded wings, is crouched on one side of her the figure of Love, with rosy feathers, and on the other the figure of Faith, with plumage of a deep azure. Over her head, on the portico, are written the words:—"I am all that hath been, is, and shall be, and no mortal hath uncovered my veil." The tinted lights falling on the group are shed, you see, from the rainbow-coloured lamps of Sais, which are countless. But in spite of all these lamps, Mr. Aylwin, no mortal can see the face behind that veil. And why? Those who alone could uplift it, the figures with folded wings—Faith and Love—are fast asleep at the great Queen's feet. When Faith and Love are sleeping there, what are the many-coloured lamps of science?—of what use are they to the famished soul of man?'

'A striking idea!' I exclaimed.

'Your father's,' replied Wilderspin, in a tone of such reverence that one might have imagined my father's spectre stood before him. 'It symbolises that base Darwinian cosmogony which Carlyle spits at, and the great and good John Ruskin scorns. But this design is only the predella beneath the picture "Faith and Love." Now look at the picture itself, Mr. Aylwin,' he continued, as though it were upon an easel before me. 'You are at Sais no longer: you are now, as the architecture around you shows, in a Greek city by the sea. In the light of innumerable lamps, torches, and wax tapers, a procession is moving through the streets. You see Isis, as Pelagia, advancing between two ranks, one of joyous maidens in snow-white garments, adorned with wreaths, and scattering from their bosoms all kinds of dewy flowers; the other of youths, playing upon pipes and flutes, mixed with men with shaven shining crowns, playing upon sistra of brass, silver, and gold. Isis wears a Dorian tunic, fastened on her breast by a tasselled knot,—an azure-coloured tunic bordered with silver stars,—and an upper garment of the colour of the moon at moonrise. Her head is crowned with a chaplet of sea-flowers, and round her throat is a necklace of seaweeds, wet still with sea-water, and shimmering with all the shifting hues of the sea. On either side of her stand the awakened angels, uplifting from her face a veil whose folds flow soft as water over her shoulders and over the wings of Faith and Love. A symbol of the true cosmogony which Philip Aylwin gave to the world!'

'Why, that's esackly like the wreath o' seaweeds as poor Winnie Wynne used to make,' said Rhona Boswell.

'The photograph of Raxton Fair!' I cried. 'Frank and Winnie, and little Bob Milford, and the seaweeds!' The terrible past came upon my soul like an avalanche, and I leapt up and walked frantically towards my own waggon. The picture, which was nothing but an idealisation of the vignette upon the title-page of my father's book—the vignette taken from the photograph of Winnie, my brother Frank, and one of my fisher-boy playmates—brought back upon me—all!

Sinfi came to me.

'What is it, brother?' said she.

'Sinfi,' I cried, 'what was that saying of your mother's about fathers and children?'

'My poor mammy's daddy, when she wur a little chavi, beat her so cruel that she was a ailin' woman all her life, and she used to say, "For good or for ill, you must dig deep to bury your daddy."'

I went back and resumed my seat by Wilderspin's side, while Sinfi returned to Cyril.

Wilderspin evidently thought that I had been overcome by the marvellous power of his description, and went on as though there had been no interruption.

'Isis,' said he,' stands before you; Isis, not matronly and stern as the mother of Horus, nor as the Isis of the licentious orgies; but (as Philip Aylwin says) "Isis, the maiden, gazing around her, with pure but mystic eyes."'

'And you got from my father's book,—The Veiled Queen, all this'—I was going to add—'jumble of classic story and mediæval mysticism,'—but I stopped short in time.

'All this and more—a thousand times more than could be rendered by the art of any painter. For the age that Carlyle spits at and the great and good John Ruskin scorns is gross, Mr. Aylwin; the age is grovelling and gross. No wonder, then, that Art in our time has nothing but technical excellence; that it despises conscience, despises aspiration, despises soul, despises even ideas—that it is worthless, all worthless.'

'Except as practised in a certain temple of art in a certain part of London that shall be nameless, whence Calliope, Euterpe, and all the rhythmic sisters are banished,' interposed Cyril.

'But how did you attain to this superlative excellence, Mr.
Wilderspin?' I asked.

'That would indeed be a long story to tell,' said he. 'Yet Philip Aylwin's son has a right to know all that I can tell. My dear friend here knows that, though famous now, I climbed the ladder of Art from the bottom rung; nay, before I could even reach the bottom rung, what a toilsome journey was mine to get within sight of the ladder at all! The future biographer of the painter of "Faith and Love" will have to record that he was born in a hovel; that he was nursed in a smithy; that his cradle was a piece of board suspended from the smithy ceiling by a chain, which his mother—his widowed mother—kept swinging by an occasional touch in the intervals of her labours at the forge.'

I did not even smile at this speech, so entirely was the effect of its egotism killed by the wonderful way of pronouncing the word 'mother.'

'You have heard,' he continued in a voice whose intense earnestness had an irresistible fascination for the ear, like that of a Hindoo charmer—'you have heard of the mother-bird who feeds her young from the blood of her own breast; that bird but feebly typifies her whom God, in His abundant love of me, gave me for a mother. There were ten of us—ten little children. My mother was a female blacksmith of Old Hill, who for four shillings and sixpence a week worked sixteen hours a day for the fogger, hammering hot iron into nails. The scar upon my forehead—look! it is shaped like the red-hot nail that one day leapt upon me from her anvil, as I lay asleep in my swing above her head. I would not lose it for all the diadems of all the monarchs of this world. She was much too poor to educate us. When the wolf is at the door, Mr. Aylwin, and the very flesh and blood of the babes in danger of perishing, what mother can find time to think of education, to think even of the salvation of the soul,—to think of anything but food—food? Have you ever wanted food, Mr. Aylwin?' he suddenly said, in a voice so magnetic from its very earnestness that I seemed for the moment to feel the faintness of hunger.

'No, no,' I said, a tide of grief rushing upon me; 'but there is one who perhaps—there is one I love more dearly than your mother loved her babes—'

Sinfi rose, and came and placed her hand upon my shoulder and whispered,

'She ain't a-starvin', brother; she never starved on the hills. She's only jest a-beggin' her bread for a little while, that's all.'

And then, after laying her hand upon my forehead, soft and soothing, she returned to Cyril's side.

'No one who has never wanted food knows what life is,' said Wilderspin, taking but little heed of even so violent an interruption as this.'No one has been entirely educated, Mr. Aylwin—no one knows the real primal meaning of that pathetic word Man—no one knows the true meaning of Man's position here among the other living creatures of this world, if he has never wanted food. Hunger gives a new seeing to the eyes.'

'That's as true as the blessed stars,' muttered old Mrs. Boswell, Rhona's beloved granny, who was squatting on a rug next to her son Jericho, with a pipe in her mouth, weaving fancy baskets, and listening intently. 'The very airth under your feet seems to be a-sinkin' away, and the sweet sunshine itself seems as if it all belonged to the Gorgios, when you're a-follerin' the patrin with the emp'y belly.'

'I thank God,' continued Wilderspin, 'that I once wanted food.'

'More nor I do,' muttered old Mrs. Boswell, as she went on weaving; 'no mammy as ever felt a little chavo [Footnote 1] a-suckin' at her burk [Footnote 2] never thanked God for wantin' food: it dries the milk, or else it sp'iles it.'

[Footnote 1: Child.]

[Footnote 2: Bosom.]

'In no way,' said Wilderspin, 'has the spirit-world neglected the education of the apostle of spiritual beauty. I became a "blower" in the smithy. As a child, from early sunrise till nearly midnight, I blew the bellows for eighteen pence a week. But long before I could read or write my mother knew that I was set apart for great things. She knew, from the profiles I used to trace with the point of a nail on the smithy walls, that, unless the heavy world pressed too heavily upon me, I should become a great painter. Except anxiety about my mother and my little brothers and sisters, I, for my part, had no thought besides this of being some day a painter. Except love for her and for them, I had no other passion. By assiduous attendance at night-schools I learnt to read and write. This enabled me to take a better berth in Black Waggon Street, where I earned enough to take lessons in drawing from the reduced widow of a once prosperous fogger. But ah! so eager was I to learn, that I did not notice how my mother was fading, wasting, dying slowly. It was not till too late that I learnt the appalling truth, that while the babes had been nourished, the mother had starved—starved! On a few ounces of bread a day no woman can work the Oliver and prod the fire. Her last whispers to me were, "I shall see you, dear, a great painter yet; Jesus will let me look down and watch my boy." Ah, Sinfi Lovell! that makes you weep. It is long, long since I ceased to weep at that. "Whatsoever is not of faith is sin."'

Rhona Boswell, down whose face also the tears were streaming, nodded in a patronising way to Wilderspin, and said, 'Reia, my mammy lives in the clouds, and I'll tell her to show you the Golden Hand, I will.'

'From the moment when I left my mother in the grave,' said Wilderspin, 'I had but one hope, that she who was watching my endeavours might not watch in vain. Art became now my religion: success in it my soul's goal. I went to London; I soon began to develop a great power of design, in illustrating penny periodicals. For years I worked at this, improving in execution with every design, but still unable to find an opening for a better class of work. What I yearned for was the opportunity to exercise the gift of colour. That I did possess this in a rare degree I knew. At last I got a commission. Oh! the joy of painting that first picture! My progress was now rapid. But I had few purchasers till Providence sent me a good man and great gentleman, my dear friend—'

'This is a long-winded speech of yours, mon cher,' yawned Cyril. 'Lady Sinfi is going to strike up with the Welsh riddle unless you get along faster.'

'Don't stop him,' I heard Sinfi mutter, as she shook Cyril angrily; 'he's mighty fond o' that mother o' his'n, an', if he's ever sich a horn nataral, I likes him.'

'I never exhibited in the Academy,' continued Wilderspin, without heeding the interruption, 'I never tried to exhibit; but, thanks to the dear friend I have mentioned, I got to know the Master himself. People came to my poor studio, and my pictures were bought from my easel as fast as I could paint them. I could please my buyers, I could please my dear friend, I could please the Master himself; I could please every person in the world but one—myself. For years I had been struggling with what cripples so many artists—with ignorance—ignorance, Mr. Aylwin, of the million points of detail which must be understood and mastered before ever the sweetness, the apparent lawlessness and abandonment of Nature can be expressed by Art. But it was now, when I had conquered these,—it was now that I was dissatisfied, and no man living was so miserable as I. I dare say you are an artist yourself, Mr. Aylwin, and will understand me when I say that artists—figure-painters, I mean,—are divided into two classes—those whose natural impulse is to paint men, and those who are sent into the world expressly to paint women. My mother's death taught me that my mission was to paint women, women whom I—being the son of Mary Wilderspin—love and understand better than other men, because my soul (once folded in her womb) is purer than other men's souls.'

'Is not modesty a Gorgio virtue, Lady Sinfi?' murmured Cyril.

'Nothin' like a painter for thinkin' strong beer of hisself,' she replied; 'but I likes him—oh, I likes him.'

'No man whose soul is stained by fleshly desire shall render in art all that there is in a truly beautiful woman's face,' said Wilderspin. 'I worked hard at imaginative painting; I worked for years and years, Mr. Aylwin, but with scant success. It shames me to say that I was at last discouraged. Hut, after a time, I began to feel that the spirit-world was giving me a strength of vision second only to the Master's own, and a cunning of hand greater than any vouchsafed to man since the death of Raphael. This was once stigmatised as egotism; but "Faith and Love," and the predella "Isis behind the Veil," have told another story. I did not despair, I say; for I knew the cause of my failure. Two sources of inspiration were wanting to me—that of a superlative subject and that of a superlative model. For the first I am indebted to Philip Aylwin; for the second I am indebted to—'

'A greater still, Miss Gudgeon, of Primrose Court,' interjected
Cyril.

'For the second I'm indebted to my mother. And yet something else was wanting,' continued Wilderspin, 'to enable me for many months to concentrate my life upon one work—the self-sacrificing generosity of such a friend as I think no man ever had before.

'Wilderspin,' said Cyril, rising, 'the Duke of Little Egypt sleeps, as you see. His Grace of the Pyramids snores, as you hear. The autobiography of a man of genius is interesting; but I fear that yours will have to be continued in our next.'

'But Mr. Aylwin wants to hear—'

'He and our other idyllic friends are early to bed and early to rise; they have, in the morning, trout to catch for breakfast, and we have a good way to walk to-night.'

'That's just like my friend,' said Wilderspin. 'That's my friend all over.'

With this they left us, and we betook ourselves to our usual evening occupations.

Next morning the two painters called upon us. Wilderspin sketched alone, while Sinfi, Rhona, Cyril, and I went trout-fishing in one of the numerous brooks.

'What do you think of my friend by this time?' said Cyril to me.

'He is my fifth mystic,' I replied; 'I wonder what the sixth will be like. Is he really as great a painter as he takes himself to he, or does his art begin and end with flowery words?'

'I believe,' said Cyril, pointing across to where Wilderspin sat at work, 'that the strange creature under that white umbrella is the greatest artistic genius now living. The death of his mother by starvation has turned his head, poor fellow, but turned it to good purpose: "Faith and Love" is the greatest modern picture in Europe. To be sure, he has the advantage of painting from the finest model ever seen, the lovely, if rather stupid, Miss Gudgeon, of Primrose Court, whom he monopolises.'

Cyril had already, during the morning, told me that my mother, who was much out of health, was now staying in London, where he had for the first time in his life met her at Lord Sleaford's house. Notwithstanding their differences of opinion, my mother and he seemed to have formed a mutual liking. He also told me that my uncle Cecil Aylwin of Alvanley (who in this narrative must not, of course, be confounded with another important relative, Henry Aylwin, Earl of Aylwin) having just died and left me the bulk of his property, I had been in much request. I consequently determined to start for London on the following day, leaving my waggon in charge of Sinfi, who was to sit to Wilderspin in the open air.

During this conversation Sinfi was absorbed in her fishing, and wandered away up the brook, and I could see that Cyril's eyes were following her with great admiration.

Turning to me and looking at me, he said, 'Lucky dog!' and then, looking again across at Sinfi, he said, 'The finest girl in England.'

V

HAROUN-AL-RASCHID THE PAINTER

I

On reaching London and finding that it was necessary I should remain there for some little time, I wrote to Cyril to say so, sending some messages to Sinfi and her father about my own living-waggon.

My mother was now staying at my aunt's house, whither I went to call upon her shortly after my arrival in town.

Our meeting was a constrained and painful one. It was my mother's cruelty to Winifred that had, in my view, completely ruined two lives. I did not know then what an awful struggle was going on in her own breast between her pride and her remorse for having driven Winnie away, to be lost in Wales. Afterwards her sad case taught me that among all the agents of soul-torture that have ever stung mankind to madness the scorpion Remorse is by far the most appalling. But other events had to take place before she reached the state when the scorpion stings to death all other passions, even Pride and even Vanity, and reigns in the bosom supreme. We could hardly meet without softening towards each other. She was most anxious to know what had occurred to me since I left Raxton to search for Winnie. I gave her the entire story from my first seeing Winnie in the cottage, to my rencontre with her at Knockers' Llyn. At this time she had accidentally been brought into contact with Miss Dalrymple, who had lately received a legacy and was now in better circumstances. Miss Dalrymple had spoken in high terms of Winnie's intelligence and culture, little thinking how she was making my mother feel more acutely than ever her own wrongdoing. Knowing that I was very fond of music, my mother persuaded me to take her on several occasions to the opera and the theatre. She with more difficulty persuaded me to consult a medical man upon the subject of my insomnia; and at last I agreed, though very reluctantly, to consult Dr. Mivart, late of Raxton, who was now living in London. Mivart attributed my ailment (as I, of course, knew he would) to hypochondria, and I saw that he was fully aware of the cause. I therefore opened my mind to him upon the subject. I told him everything in connection with Winifred in Wales.

He pondered the subject carefully and then said:

'What you need is to escape from these terrible oscillations between hope and despair. Therefore I think it best to tell you frankly that Miss Wynne is certainly dead. Even suppose that she did not fall down a precipice in Wales, she is, I repeat, certainly dead. So severe a form of hysteria as hers must have worn her out by this time. It is difficult for me to think that any nervous system could withstand a strain so severe and so prolonged.'

I felt the terrible truth of his words, but I made no answer.

'But let this be your consolation,' said he. 'Her death is a blessing to herself, and the knowledge that she is dead will be a blessing to you.'

'A blessing to me?' I said.

'I mean that it will save you from the mischief of these alternations between hope and despair. You will remember that it was I who saw her in her first seizure and told you of it. Such a seizure having lasted so long, nothing could have given her relief but death or magnetic transmission of the seizure. It is a grievous case, but what concerns me now is the condition into which you yourself have passed. Nothing but a successful effort on your part to relieve your mind from the dominant idea that has disturbed it can save you from—from—'

'From what?'

'That drug of yours is the most dangerous narcotic of all. Increase your doses by a few more grains and you will lose all command over your nervous system—all presence of mind. Give it up, give it up and enter Parliament.'

I left Mivart in anger, and took a stroll through the streets, trying to amuse myself by looking at the shop windows and recalling the few salient incidents that were connected with my brief experiences as an art student.

Hours passed in this way, until one by one the shops were closed and only the theatres, public bars, and supper-rooms seemed to be open.

I turned into a restaurant in the Haymarket, for I had taken no dinner. I went upstairs into a supper-room, and after I had finished my meal, taking a seat near the window, I gazed abstractedly over the bustling, flashing streets, which to me seemed far more lonely, far more remote, than the most secluded paths of Snowdon. In a trouble such as mine it is not Man but Nature that can give companionship.

I was so absorbed in my thoughts that I did not observe whether I was or was not now alone in the room, till the name of Wilderspin fell on my ear and recalled me to myself. I started and looked round. At a table near me sat two men whom I had not noticed before. The face of the man who sat on the opposite side of the table confronted me.

If I had one tithe of that objective power and that instinct for description which used to amaze me in Winifred as a child, I could give here a picture of a face which the reader could never forget.

If it was not beautiful in detail it was illuminated by an expression that gave a unity of beauty to the whole. And what was the expression? I can only describe it by saying that it was the expression of genius; and it had that imperious magnetism which I had never before seen in any face save that of Sinfi Lovell. But striking as was the face of this man, I soon found that his voice was more striking still. In whatever assembly that voice was heard, its indescribable resonance would have marked it off from all other voices, and have made the ear of the listener eager to catch the sound. This voice, however, was not the one that had uttered the name of Wilderspin. It was from his companion, who sat opposite to him, with his great broad back, covered with a smart velvet coat, towards me, that the talk was now coming. This man was smoking cigarettes in that kind of furious sucking way which is characteristic of great smokers. Much smoking, however, had not dried up his skin to the consistence of blotting paper and to the colour of tobacco ash as it does in some cases, but tobacco juice, which seemed to ooze from his face like perspiration, or rather like oil, had made his complexion of a yellow green colour, something like a vegetable marrow. Although his face was as hairless as a woman's, there was not a feature in it that was not masculine. Although his cheek-bones were high and his jaw was of the mould which we so often associate with the prizefighter, he looked as if he might somehow be a gentleman. And when I got for a moment a full view of his face as he turned round, I thought it showed power and intelligence, although his forehead receded a good deal, a recession which was owing mainly to the bone above the eyes. Power and intelligence too were seen in every glance of his dark bright eyes. In a few minutes Wilderspin's name was again uttered by this man, and I found he was telling anecdotes of the eccentric painter—telling them with great gusto and humour, in a loud voice, quite careless of being overheard by me. Then followed other anecdotes of other people—artists for the most part—in which the names of Millais, Ruskin, Watts, Leighton, and others came up in quick succession.

That he was a professional anecdote-monger of extraordinary brilliancy, a raconteur of the very first order, was evident enough. I found also that as a story-teller he was reckless and without conscience. He was, I thought, inventing anecdotes to amuse his companion, whose manifest enjoyment of them rather weakened the impression that his own personality had been making upon me.

After a while the name of Cyril Aylwin came up, and I soon found the man telling a story of Cyril and a recent escapade of his which I knew must be false. He then went rattling on about other people, mentioning names which, as I soon gathered, were those of female models known in the art world. The anecdotes he told of these were mostly to their disadvantage. I was about to move to another table, in order to get out of earshot of this gossip, when the name 'Lady Sinfi' fell upon my ears.

And then I heard the other man—the man of the musical voice—talk about Lady Sinfi with the greatest admiration and regard. He wound up by saying, 'By the bye, where is she now? I should like to use her in painting my new picture.'

'She's in Wales; so Kiomi told me.'

'Ah yes! I remember she has an extraordinary passion for Snowdon.'

'Her passion is now for something else, though.'

'What's that?'

'A man.'

'I never saw a girl so indifferent to men as Lady Sinfi.'

'She is living at this moment as the mistress of a cousin of Cyril
Aylwin.'

My blood boiled with rage. I lost all control of myself. I longed to feel his face against my knuckles.

'That's not true,' I said in a rather loud voice.

He started up, and turned round, saying in a hectoring voice, 'What was that you said to me? Will you repeat your words?'

'To repeat one's words,' I said quietly, 'shows a limited vocabulary, so I will put it thus,—what you said just now about Sinfi Lovell being the mistress of Cyril Aylwin's cousin is a lie.'

'You dare to give me the lie, sir? And what the devil do you mean by listening to our conversation?'

The threatening look that he managed to put into his face was so entirely histrionic that it made me laugh outright. This seemed to damp his courage more than if I had sprung up and shown fight. The man had a somewhat formidable appearance, however, as regards build, which showed that he possessed more than average strength. It was the manifest genuineness of my laugh that gave him pause. And when I sat with my elbows on the table and my face between my palms, taking stock of him quietly, he looked extremely puzzled. The man of the musical voice sat and looked at me as though under a spell.

'I am a young man from the country,' I said to him. 'To what theatre is your histrionic friend attached? I should like to see him in a better farce than this.'

'Do you hear that, De Castro?' said the other. 'What is your theatre?'

'If he is really excited,' I said, 'tell him that people at a public supper-room should speak in a moderate tone or their conversation is likely to be overheard.'

'Do you hear this young man from the country, De Castro?' said he.
'You seem to be the Oraculum of the hay-fields, sir,' he continued,
turning to me with a delightfully humorous expression on his face.
'Have you any other Delphic utterance?'

'Only this,' I said, 'that people who do not like being given the lie should tell the truth.'

'May I be permitted to guess your Christian name, sir? Is it Martin, perchance?'

'Yes,' I replied, 'and my surname is Tupper.' He then got up and laid his hand on the raconteur's shoulder, and said, 'Don't be a fool, De Castro. When a man looks at another as the author of the Proverbial Philosophy is looking at you, he knows that he can use his fists as well as his pen.'

'He gave me the lie. Didn't you hear?'

'I did, and I thought the gift as entirely gratuitous, mon cher, as giving a scuttleful of coals to Newcastle.'

The anecdote-monger stood silent, quelled by this man's voice.

Then turning to me, the man of the musical voice said, 'I suppose you know something about my friend Lady Sinfi?'

'I do,' I said, 'and I am Cyril Aylwin's kinsman, whom you call his cousin, so perhaps, as every word your friend has said about Sinfi Lovell and me is false, you will allow me to call him a liar.'

A look of the greatest glee at the discomfiture of his companion overspread his face.

'Certainly,' he said with a loud laugh. 'You may call him that, you may even qualify the noun you have used with an adjective if the author of the Proverbial Philosophy can think of one that is properly descriptive and yet not too unparliamentary. So you are Cyril Aylwin's kinsman. I have heard him,' he said, with a smile that he tried in vain to suppress, 'I have heard Cyril expatiate on the various branches of the Aylwin family.'

'I belong to the proud Aylwins,' I said.

The twinkle in his eye made me adore him as he said—'The proud Aylwins. A man who, in a world like this, is proud and knows it, and is proud of confessing his pride, always interests me, but I will not ask you what makes the proud Aylwins proud, sir.'

'I will tell you what makes me proud,' I said: 'my great-grandmother was a full-blooded Gypsy, and I am proud of the descent.'

He came forward and held out his hand and said, 'It is long since I met a man who interested me'—he gave a sigh—'very long; and I hope that you and I may become friends.'

I grasped his hand and shook it warmly.

The anecdote-monger began talking at once about Sinfi, Wilderspin, and Cyril Aylwin, speaking of them in the most genial and affectionate terms. In a few minutes, without withdrawing a word he had said about either of them, he had entirely changed the spirit of every word. At first I tried to resist his sophistry, but it was not to be resisted. I ended by apologising to him for my stupidity in misunderstanding him.

'My dear fellow,' said he, 'not a word, not a word. I admired the way in which you stood up for absent friends. Didn't you, D'Arcy?'

At this the other broke out into another mellow laugh. 'I did. How's your kinsman, and how's Wilderspin?' he said, turning to me. 'Did you leave them well?'

We soon began, all three of us, to talk freely together. Of course I was filled with curiosity about my new friends, especially about the liar. His extraordinary command of facial expression, coupled with the fact that he wore no hair on his face, made me at first think he was a great actor; but being at that time comparatively ignorant of the stage, I did not attempt to guess what actor it was. After a while his prodigious acuteness struck me more than even his histrionic powers, and I began to ask myself what Old Bailey barrister it was.

Turning at last to the one called D'Arcy, I said. 'You are an artist; you are a painter?'

'I have been trying for many years to paint,' he said.

'And you?' I said, turning to his companion.

'He is an artist too,' D'Arcy said, 'but his line is not painting—he is an artist in words.'

'A poet?' I said in amazement.

'A romancer, the greatest one of his time unless it be old Dumas.'

'A novelist?'

'Yes, but he does not write his novels, he speaks them.'

De Castro, evidently with a desire to turn the conversation from himself and his profession, said, pointing to D'Arcy, 'You see before you the famous painter Haroun-al-Raschid, who has never been known to perambulate the streets of London except by night, and in me you see his faithful vizier.'

It soon became evident that D'Arcy, for some reason or other, had thoroughly taken to me—more thoroughly, I thought, than De Castro seemed to like, for whenever D'Arcy seemed to be on the verge of asking me to call at his studio, De Castro would suddenly lead the conversation off into another channel by means of some amusing anecdote. However, the painter was not to be defeated in his intention; indeed I noticed during the conversation that although D'Arcy yielded to the sophistries of his companion, he did so wilfully. While he forced his mind, as it were, to accept these sophistries there seemed to be all the while in his consciousness a perception that sophistries they were. He ended by giving me his address and inviting me to call upon him.

'I am only making a brief stay in London,' he said; 'I am working hard at a picture in the country, but business just now calls me to London for a short time.'

With this we parted at the door of the restaurant.

II

It was through the merest accident that I saw these two men again.

One evening I had been dining with my mother and aunt. I think I may say that I had now become entirely reconciled to my mother. I used to call upon her often, and at every call I could not but observe how dire was the struggle going on within her breast between pride and remorse. She felt, and rightly felt, that the loss of Winifred among the Welsh hills had been due to her harshness in sending the stricken girl away from Raxton, to say nothing of her breaking her word with me after having promised to take my place and watch for the exposure of the cross by the wash of the tides until the danger was certainly past.

But against my aunt I cherished a stronger resentment every day. She it was, with her inferior intellect and insect soul, who had in my childhood prejudiced my mother against me and in favour of Frank, because I showed signs of my descent from Fenella Stanley while Frank did not. She it was who first planted in my mother's mind the seeds of prejudice against Winnie as being the daughter of Tom Wynne.

The influence of such a paltry nature upon a woman of my mother's strength and endowments had always astonished as much as it had irritated me.

I had not learnt then what I fully learnt afterwards, that in this life it is mostly the dull and stupid people who dominate the clever ones—that it is, in short, the fools who govern the world.

I should, of course, never have gone to Belgrave Square at all had it not been to see my mother. Such a commonplace slave of convention was my aunt, that, on the evening I am now mentioning, she had scarcely spoken to me during dinner, because, having been detained at the solicitor's, I had found it quite impossible to go to my hotel to dress for her ridiculous seven o'clock dinner.

When I found that my mother had actually taken this inferior woman into her confidence in regard to my affairs and told her all about Winnie and the cross, my dislike of her became intensified, and on this evening my mother very much vexed me in the drawing-room by taking the cross from a cabinet and saying to me,

'What is now to be done with this? All along the coast there are such notions about its value that to replace it in the tomb would be simple madness.' I made no reply. 'Indeed,' she continued, looking at the amulet as she might have looked at a cobra uprearing its head to spring at her, 'it must really be priceless. And to think that all this was to be buried in the coffin of—! It is your charge, however, and not mine.'

'Yes, mother,' I said, 'it is my charge;' and taking up the cross I wrapped it in my handkerchief.

'Take the amulet and guard it well,' she said, as I placed it carefully in the breast pocket of my coat.

'And remember,' said my aunt, breaking into the conversation, 'that the true curses of the Aylwins are and always have been superstition and love-madness.'

'I should have added a third curse,—pride, aunt,' I could not help replying.

'Henry,' said she, pursing her thin lips, 'you have the obstinacy and the courage of your race, that is to say, you have the obstinacy and the courage of ten ordinary men, and yet a man you are not—a man you will never be, if strength of character, and self-mastery and power to withstand the inevitable trials of life, go to the making of a man.'

'Pardon me, aunt; but such trials as mine are beyond your comprehension.'

'Are they, boy?' said she. 'This fancy of yours for an insignificant girl—this boyish infatuation which with any other young man of your rank would have long ago exhausted itself and been forgotten—is a passion that absorbs your life. And I tremble for you: I tremble for the house you represent.'

But I saw by the expression on my mother's face that my aunt had now gone too far. 'Prue,' she said, 'your tremblings concerning my son and my family are, I assure you, gratuitous. Such trembling as the case demands you had better leave to me. My heart tells me I have been very wrong to that poor child, and I would give much to know that she was found and that she was well.'

I set out to walk to my hotel, wondering how I was to while away the long night until sleep should come to relieve me. Suddenly I remembered D'Arcy, and my promise to call upon him. I changed my course, and hailing a hansom drove to the address he had given me.

When I reached the door I found, upon looking at my watch, that it was late—so late that I was dubious whether I should ring the bell. I remembered, however, that he told me how very late his hours were, and I rang.

On sending in my card I was shown at once into the studio, and after threading my way between some pieces of massive furniture and pictures upon easels, I found D'Arcy lolling lazily upon a huge sofa. Seeing that he was not alone, I was about to withdraw, for I was in no mood to meet strangers. However, he sprang up and introduced me to his guest, whom he called Symonds, an elegant-looking man in a peculiar kind of evening dress, who, as I afterwards learned, was one of Mr. D'Arcy's chief buyers. This gentleman bowed stiffly to me.

He did not stay long; indeed, it was evident that the appearance of a stranger somewhat disconcerted him.

After he was gone D'Arcy said, 'A good fellow! One of my most important buyers. I should like you to know him, for you and I are going to be friends. I hope.'

He seems very fond of pictures,' I said. A man of great taste, with a real love of art and music.'

In a little while after this gentleman's departure in came De Castro, who had driven up in a hansom. I certainly saw a flash of anger in his eyes as he recognised me, but it vanished like lightning, and his manner became cordiality itself. Late as it was (it was nearly twelve), he pulled out his cigarette case, and evidently intended to begin the evening. As soon as he was told that Mr. Symonds had been, he began to talk about him in a disparaging manner. Evidently his metier was, as I had surmised, that of a professional talker. Talk was his stock-in-trade.

The night wore on, and De Castro in the intervals of his talk kept pulling out his watch. It was evident that he wanted to be going, but was reluctant to leave me there. For my part, I frequently rose to go, but on getting a sign from D'Arcy that he wished me to stay I sat down again. At last D'Arcy said,

'You had better go now, De Castro, you have kept that hansom outside for more than an hour and a half; and besides, if you stay till daylight our friend here will stay longer, for I want to talk with him alone.'

De Castro got up with a laugh that seemed genuine enough, and left us.

D'Arcy, who was still on the sofa, then lapsed into a silence that became after a while rather awkward. He lay there, gazing abstractedly at the fireplace.

'Some of my friends call me, as you heard De Castro say the other night, Haroun-al-Raschid, and I suppose I am like him in some things. I am a bad sleeper, and to be amused by De Castro when I can't sleep is the chief of blessings. De Castro, however, is not so bad as he seems. A man may be a scandal-monger without being really malignant. I have known him go out of his way to do a struggling man a service.'

'You are a bad sleeper?' I said, in a tone that proclaimed at once that I was a bad sleeper also.

'Yes,' said he, 'and so are you, as I noticed the other night. I can always tell. There is something in the eyes when a man is a bad sleeper that proclaims it to me.'

Then springing up from the divan and laying his hand upon my shoulder, he said, 'And you have a great trouble at the heart. You have had some great loss the effect of which is sapping the very fountains of your life. We should be friends. We must be friends. I asked you to call upon me because we must be friends.'

His voice was so tender that I was almost unmanned.

I will not dwell upon this part of my narrative; I will only say that
I told him something of my story, and he told me his.

I told him that a terrible trouble had unhinged the mind of a young lady whom I deeply loved, and that she had been lost on the Welsh hills. I felt that it was only right that I should know more of him before giving him the more intimate details connected with Winnie, myself, and the secrets of my family. He listened to every word with the deepest attention and sympathy. After a while he said,

'You must not go to your hotel to-night. A friend of mine who occupies two rooms is not sleeping here to-night, and I particularly wish for you to take his bed, so that I can see you in the morning. We shall not breakfast together. My breakfast is a peculiarly irregular meal. But when you wake ring your bedroom bell and order your own breakfast; afterwards we shall meet in the studio.'

I did not in the least object to this arrangement, for I found his society a great relief.

Next morning, after I had finished my solitary breakfast, I asked the servant if Mr. D'Arcy had yet risen. On being told that he had not, I went downstairs into the studio where I had spent the previous evening. After examining the pictures on the walls and the easels, I walked to the window and looked out at the garden. It was large, and so neglected and untrimmed as to be a veritable wilderness. While I was marvelling why it should have been left in this state, I saw the eyes of some animal staring at me from the distance, and was soon astonished to see that they belonged to a little Indian bull. My curiosity induced me to go into the garden and look at the creature. He seemed rather threatening at first, but after a while allowed me to go up to him and stroke him. Then I left the Indian bull and explored this extraordinary domain. It was full of unkempt trees, including two fine mulberries, and surrounded by a very high wall. Soon I came across an object which, at first, seemed a little mass of black and white oats moving along, but I presently discovered it to be a hedgehog. It was so tame that it did not curl up as I approached it, but allowed me, though with some show of nervousness, to stroke its pretty little black snout. As I walked about the garden, I found it was populated with several kinds of animals such as are never seen except in menageries or in the Zoological Gardens. Wombats, kangaroos, and the like, formed a kind of happy family.

My love of animals led me to linger in the garden. When I returned to the house I found D'Arcy in the green dining-room, where we talked, and he read aloud some verses to me. We then went to the studio. He said,

'No doubt you are surprised at my menagerie. Every man has one side of his character where the child remains. I have a love of animals which, I suppose, I may call a passion. The kind of amusement they can afford me is like none other. It is the self-consciousness of men and women that makes them, in a general way, intensely unamusing. I turn from them to the unconscious brutes, and often get a world of enjoyment. To watch a kitten or a puppy play, or the funny antics of a parrot or a cockatoo, or the wise movements of a wombat, will keep me for hours from being bored.'

'And children,' I said—'do you like children?'

'Yes, so long as they remain like the young animals—until they become self-conscious, I mean, and that is very soon. Then their charm goes. Has it ever occurred to you how fascinating a beautiful young girl would be if she were as unconscious as a young animal? What makes you sigh?'

My thoughts had flown to Winifred breakfasting with her 'Prince of the Mist' on Snowdon. And I said to myself, 'How he would have been fascinated by a sight like that!'

My experience of men at that time was so slight that the opinion I then formed of D'Arcy as a talker was not of much account. But since then I have seen very much of men, and I find that I was right in the view I then took of his conversational powers. When his spirits were at their highest he was without an equal as a wit, without an equal as a humourist. He had more than even Cyril Aylwin's quickness of repartee, and it was of an incomparably rarer quality. To define it would be, of course, impossible, but I might perhaps call it poetic fancy suddenly stimulated at moments by animal spirits into rapid movements—so rapid, indeed, that what in slower movement would be merely fancy, in him became wit. Beneath the coruscations of this wit a rare and deep intellect was always perceptible.

His humour was also so fanciful that it seemed poetry at play, but here was the remarkable thing: although he was not unconscious of his other gifts, he did not seem to be in the least aware that he was a humourist of the first order; every jeu d'esprit seemed to leap from him involuntarily, like the spray from a fountain. A dull man like myself must not attempt to reproduce these qualities here.

While he was talking he kept on painting, and I said to him, 'I can't understand how you can keep up a conversation while you are at work.'

I took care not to tell him that I was an amateur painter.

'It is only when the work that I am on is in some degree mechanical that I can talk while at work. These flowers, which were brought to me this morning for my use in painting this picture, will very soon wither, and I can put them into the picture without being disturbed by talk; but if I were at work upon this face, if I were putting dramatic expression into these eyes, I should have to be silent.'

He then went on talking upon art and poetry, letting fall at every moment gems of criticism that would have made the fortune of a critic.

After a while, however, he threw down the brush and said,

'Sometimes I can paint with another man in the studio; sometimes I can't.'

I rose to go.

'No, no,' he said; 'I don't want you to go, yet I don't like keeping you in this musty studio on such a morning. Suppose we take a stroll together.'

'But you never walk out in the daytime.'

'Not often; indeed, I may say never, unless it is to go to the Zoo, or to Jamrach's, which I do about once in three months.'

'Jamrach's!' I said. 'Why, he's the importer of animals, isn't he? Of all places in London that is the one I should most like to see.' He then took me into a long panelled room with bay windows looking over the Thames, furnished with remarkable Chinese chairs and tables. And then we left the house.

In Maud Street a hansom passed us; D'Arcy hailed it.

'We will take this to the Bank,' said he, 'and then walk through the
East End to Jamrach's. Jump in.'

As we drove off, the sun was shining brilliantly, and London seemed very animated—seemed to be enjoying itself. Until we reached the Bank our drive was through all the most cheerful-looking and prosperous streets of London. It acted like a tonic on me, and for the first time since my trouble I felt really exhilarated. As to D'Arcy, after we had left behind us what he called the 'stucco world' of the West End, his spirits seemed to rise every minute, and by the time we reached the Strand he was as boisterous as a boy on a holiday.

On reaching the Bank we dismissed the hansom and proceeded to walk to Ratcliffe Highway. Before reaching it I was appalled at the forbidding aspect of the neighbourhood. It was not merely that the unsavoury character of the streets offended and disgusted me, but the locality wore a sinister aspect which acted upon my imagination in the strangest, wildest way. Why was it that this aspect fairly cowed me, scared me? I felt that I was not frightened on my own account, and yet when I asked myself why I was frightened I could not find a rational answer.

As I saw the sailors come noisily from their boarding-houses; as I saw the loafers standing at the street corners, smoking their dirty pipes and gazing at us; as I saw the tawdry girls, bare-headed or in flaunting hats covered with garish flowers, my thoughts, for no conceivable reason, ran upon Winnie more persistently than they had run upon her since I had abandoned all hope of seeing her in Wales.

The thought came to me that, grievous as was her fate and mine, the tragedy of our lives might have been still worse.

'Suppose,' I said, 'that instead of being lost in the Welsh hills she had been lost here!' I shuddered at the thought.

Again that picture in the Welsh pool came to me, the picture of Winnie standing at a street corner, offering matches for sale. D'Arcy then got talking about Sinfi Lovell and her strange superiority in every respect to the few Gypsy women he had seen.

'She has,' said he, 'mesmeric power; it is only semiconscious, but it is mesmeric. She exercises it partly through her gaze and partly through her voice.'

He was still talking about Sinfi when a river-boy, who was whistling with extraordinary brilliancy and gusto, met and passed us. Not a word more of D'Arcy's talk did I hear, for the boy was whistling the very air to which Winnie used to sing the Snowdon song

I met in a glade a lone little maid
At the foot of y Wyddfa the white.

I ran after the boy and asked him what tune he was whistling.

'What tune?' he said, 'blowed if I know.'

'Where did you hear it?' I asked.

'Well, there used to be a gal, a kind of a beggar gal, as lived not far from 'ere for a little while, but she's gone away now, and she used to sing that tune. I allas remember tunes, but I never could make out anything of the words.'

D'Arcy laughed at my eccentricity in running after the boy to learn where he had got a tune. But I did not tell him why.

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 is
European.'

'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 who knows!'

'I will commit no such outrage upon reason as to place a priceless jewel in a place where I know it will be stolen.'

'You will replace 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!

VI

THE SONG OF Y WYDDFA

I

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 entirely
had my long pain robbed me of all presence of mind, that, by the time
I had recovered from the paralysing shock, we had reached Piccadilly
Circus. 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, as
I stepped out of the carriage, and shook hands with them. 'A sudden
recollection—important papers unsecured at my hotel—business in—in
Lincoln'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.

II

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.

VII

SINFI'S DUKKERIPEN

I

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.

II

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's what 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. You must marry 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.'

III

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 to force majeure in 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.

VIII

ISIS AS HUMOURIST

I

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 at that. 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.

II

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 of The Caricaturist will 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 of The 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 introduce you,' 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 "the Principium hylarchicum of 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's t'other eye'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' made t'other eye 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 name is Gudgeon,—I don't say it is," says I, "but supposin' as it is,—what then?" sez I. "But is that 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' will you answer my simple kervestion, Mr. Shiny Quaker?" sez I. "Supposin' my name was Mrs. Gudgeon,—I don't say it is, 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's her you 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, do you?" 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 never do mistake, 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 'im for 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 for my moral. 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, not à la Raphael.'

'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 in The Art Review, written by the great painter D'Arcy.'

He then took from Cyril's table a number of The 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 in The Veiled Queen that "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.'

IX

THE PALACE OF NIN-KI-GAL

I

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.'

II

On re-entering my room, as I stood and gazed at my father's book The 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.

THE SIBYL.

What answer, O Nin-ki-gal?
What answer, O Nin-ki-gal?
Have pity, O Queen of Queens!

NIN-KI-GAL

Life's fountain flows,
And still the drink is Death's;
Life's garden blows,
And still 'tis Ashtoreth's; [Footnote]
But all is Nin-ki-gal's.
I lent the drink of Day
To man and beast;
I lent the drink of Day
To gods for feast;
I poured the river of Night
On gods surceased:
Their blood was Nin-ki-gal's.

[Footnote: Hathor.]

THE SIBYL.

What sowest thou, Nin-ki-gal?
What growest thou, Nin-ki-gal?
Have pity, O Queen of Queens!

NIN-KI-GAL.

Life-seeds I sow—
To reap the numbered breaths;
Fair flowers I grow—
And hers, red Ashtoreth's;
Yea, all are Nin-ki-gal's!

THE SIBYL.

What knowest thou, Nin-ki-gal?
What showest thou, Nin-ki-gal?
Have pity, O Queen of Queens!

NIN-KI-GAL.

Nor king nor slave I know,
Nor tribes, nor shibboleths;
But Life-in-Death I know—
Yea, Nin-ki-gal I know—
Life's Queen and Death's.

And what was the effect upon me of these communings with the ancestors whose superstitions I have, perhaps, been throughout this narrative treating in a spirit that hardly becomes their descendant?

The best and briefest way of answering this question is to confess not what I thought, as I went on studying my father's book, its strange theories and revelations, but what I did. I read the book all day long: I read it all the next day. I cannot say what days passed. One night I resumed my wanderings in the streets for an hour or two, and then returned home and went to bed,—but not to sleep. For me there was no more sleep till those ancestral voices could be quelled—till that sound of Winnie's song in the street could be stopped in my ears. For very relief from them I again leapt out of bed, lit a candle, unlocked the cabinet, and taking out the amulet, proceeded to examine the I facets as I did once before when I heard in the Swiss cottage these words of my stricken father:—

'Should you ever come to love as I have loved, you will find that materialism is intolerable—is hell itself—to the heart that has known a passion like mine. You will find that it is madness, Hal, madness, to believe in the word "never"! You will find that you dare not leave untried any creed, howsoever wild, that offers the heart a ray of hope.'

And then while the candle burnt out dead in the socket I sat in a waking dream.

III

The bright light of morning was pouring through the window. I gave a start of horror, and cried, 'Whose face?' Opposite to me there seemed to be sitting on a bed the figure of a man with a fiery cross upon his breast. That strange wild light upon the face, as it the pains at the heart were flickering up through the flesh—where had I seen it? For a moment when, in Switzerland, my father bared his bosom to me, that ancestral flame had flashed up into his dull lineaments. But upon the picture of 'The Sibyl' in the portrait-gallery that illumination was perpetual!

'It is merely my own reflex in a looking-glass,' I exclaimed.

Without knowing it I had slung the cross round my neck.

And then Sinfi Lovell's voice seemed murmuring 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 turned the cross round: the front of it was now next to my skin. Sharp as needles were those diamond and ruby points as I sat and gazed in the glass. Slowly a sensation arose on my breast, of pain that was a pleasure wild and new. I was feeling the facet. But the tears trickling down, salt, through my moustache tears of laughter; for Sinfi Lovell seemed again murmuring, 'For good or for ill, you must dig deep to bury your daddy.'

What thoughts and what sensations were mine as I sat there, pressing the sharp stones into my breast, thinking of her to whom the sacred symbol had come, not as a blessing, but as a curse—what agonies were mine as I sat there sobbing the one word 'Winnie,'—could be understood by myself alone, the latest blossom of the passionate blood that for generations had brought bliss and bale to the Aylwins.

* * * * *

I cannot tell what I felt and thought, but only what I did. And while I did it my reason was all the time scoffing at my heart (for whose imperious behoof the wild, mad things I am about to record were done)—scoffing, as an Asiatic malefactor will sometimes scoff at the executioner whose pitiless and conquering saw is severing his bleeding body in twain. I arose and murmured ironically to Fenella Stanley as I wrapped the cross in a handkerchief and placed it in a hand-valise: 'Secrecy is the first thing for us sacrilegists to consider, dear Sibyl, in placing a valuable jewel in a tomb in a deserted church. To take any one into our confidence would be impossible; we must go alone. But to open the tomb and, close it again, and leave no trace of what has been done, will require all our skill. And as burglars' jemmies are not on open sale we must buy, on our way to the railway-station, screw-drivers, chisels, a hammer, and a lantern; for who should know better than you, dear Sibyl, that the palace of Nin-ki-gal is dark?'

IV

As I hurried towards the Great Eastern Railway station, I felt like a horse drawn by a Gypsy whisperer to do something against his own will, and yet in the street I stopped to buy the tools. Reaching Dullingham in the afternoon, I lunched there; and as I walked thence along the cliff, towards Raxton, I became more calm and collected. I determined not to go near the Hall, lest my movements should be watched by the servants. The old churchyard was full of workmen of the navvy kind, and I learned that for the safety of the public it had now become necessary to hurl down upon the sands some enormous masses of the cliff newly disintegrated by the land-springs. I descended the gangway at Flinty Point, and concealing my implements behind a boulder in the cliff, ascended Needle Point, and went into the town.

I had previously become aware, from conversations with my mother, that Wynne had been succeeded as custodian of the old church by Shales, the humpbacked tailor, and I apprehended no difficulty in getting the keys of the church and crypt from my simple-minded acquaintance, without arousing his suspicions as to my mission.

Therefore I went at once to the tailor's shop, but found that Shales was out, attending an annual Odd-Fellows' carousal at Graylingham. Consequently I was obliged to open my business to his mother, a far shrewder person, and one who might be much more difficult to deal with. However, the fact of the navvies being at work so close to a church whose chancel belonged to my family afforded an excellent motive for my visit. But before I could introduce the subject to Mrs. Shales, I had to listen to an exhaustive chronicle of Raxton and Graylingham doings since I had left. Hence by the time I quitted her (with a promise to return the keys in the morning) the sun was setting.

But, as I walked along Wilderness Road towards the church, a new and unexpected difficulty presented itself to my mind. I could not, without running the risk of an interruption, enter the church till after the Odd-Fellows had all returned from Graylingham, as Shales and his companions would have to pass along Wilderness Road, which skirts the churchyard. Shales himself was as short-sighted as a bat; but his companions had the usual long-sight of agriculturists, and would descry the slightest movement in the church-yard, or any glimmer of light at the church windows.

I would have postponed my enterprise till the morrow; but another important appointment at the office of our solicitor with my mother, precluded the possibility of this. So my visit to the catacomb must perforce be late at night.

Accordingly I descended the cliff and waited to hear the return of the carousers. There I sat down upon the well-remembered boulder, lost in recollections of all that had passed on those sands, while over the sea the night spread like the widening, darkening wings of an enormous spectral bird, whose brooding voice was the drone of the waves as they came nearer and nearer. Then I began to think of what lay before me, of the strangeness and wildness of my life.

Then I recalled, with a shudder I could not repress, those sepulchral chambers beneath the church, which, owing, I believe, to the directions in an ancestor's will, had been the means of saving it from demolition after a large portion of the churchyard bad been condemned as dangerous. Raxton church is the only one along the coast that can boast a crypt: all the churches are Perpendicular in style, too late for crypts; a fact which is supposed to indicate that Raxton was, in very early times, a seaside town of great importance; for the crypt is much older than the church, and of an entirely different kind of architecture. It was once a depository for the bones of Danish warriors killed before the Norman Conquest; it extends not only beneath the chancel, as in most cases, but beneath both the transepts. The vaulting (supported partly on low columns of remarkable beauty and partly on the basement wall of the church) is therefore of unusual extent. The external door in the churchyard is now hidden by drifted sand and mould. Many years ago, to give place to the tombs and coffins of my family, the bones of the old Danes were piled together in various corners; and the thought of these bones called up the picture of the abode of 'Nin-ki-gal,' the Queen of Death,

Ghosts, like birds, flutter their wings there;
On the gate and the gate-posts the dust lies undisturbed.

Then my mind began to make pictures for itself of my father lying in his coffin. I have, I think, already said that his body had been embalmed, in order to allow of its being conveyed from Switzerland to England. Therefore I had no dread of being confronted by that attribute of Death alluded to by D'Arcy which is the most cruel and terrible of all—corruption. But then what change should I find in the expression of those features which on the day of the interment had looked so calm? A thrill ran through my frame as I pictured myself raising the coffin-lid, and finding expressed upon the face, in language more appalling than any malediction in articulate speech—the curse!

At about ten o'clock I mounted the gangway and waited behind a deserted bungalow built for Fenella Stanley till I should hear the Odd-Fellows returning. In a few minutes I heard them approaching. They were singing snatches of songs they had been entertained with at Graylingham, and chatting and laughing as they went down Wilderness Road towards Raxton. As they passed the bungalow and adjoining mill there was a silence.

I heard one man say: ''Ez Tom Wynne's ghooast bin seen here o' late?'

'Nooa, but the Squoire's 'ez,' said another.

'I say they've both on 'em bin seed,' exclaimed a third voice, which I recognised to be that of old Lantoff of the 'Fishing Smack'—'leaseways, if they ain't bin seed they've bin 'eeared. One Saturday arternoon old Sal Gunn wur in the church a-cleanin' The Hall brasses, an' jist afore sundown, as she wur a-comin' away, she 'eeared a awful scrimmage an squealin' in the crypt, and she 'eeared the v'ice o' the Squoire a-callin' out, and she 'eeared Tom Wynne's v'ice a-cussin' an' a-swearin' at 'im. And more nor that, Sal told me that on the night when the Squoire wur buried, she seed Tom a-draggin' the Squoire's body along the churchyard to the cliff; only she never spoke on it at the time. And Sal says she larnt in a dream that the moment as Tom went and laid 'is 'and on that 'ere dimind cross in the coffin, up springs Squoire and claps 'old o' Tom's throat, and Tom takes 'old on him, and drags him out o' the church, meanin' to chuck him over the cliffs, when God o' mighty, as wur a-keepin' 'is eye on Tom all the time, he jist lets go o' the cliffs and down they falls, and kills Tom, an' buries him an' Squoire tew.'

'Did you say Sal seed all that in a dream? or did she see it in ole ale, Muster Lantoff?' said Shales.

'Well,' replied Lantoff, as the party turned past the bungalow, 'p'raps it wur ole ale as made me see in this very bungaler when I wur a bor the ghooast o' the great Gypsy lady whose pictur hangs up at the Hall, her as they used to call the old Squoire's Witch-wife.' Soon the singing and laughing were renewed; and I stood and listened to the sounds till they died away in the distance. Then I unlocked the church door and entered.

V

As I walked down an aisle, the echoes of my footsteps seemed almost loud enough to be heard on the Wilderness Road. No one could have a more contemptuous disbelief in ghosts than I, and yet the man's words about the ghost of Fenella Stanley haunted me. When I reached the heavy nailed door leading down to the crypt, I lit the lantern. The rusty key turned so stiffly in the lock, that, to relieve my hands (which were burdened with the implements I had brought), I slung the hair-chain of the cross around my neck, intending merely to raise the coffin-lid sufficiently high to admit of my slipping the amulet in.

Having, with much difficulty, opened the door, I entered the crypt. The atmosphere, though not noisome, was heavy, and charged with an influence that worked an extraordinary effect upon my brain and nerves. It was as though my personality were becoming dissipated, until at last it was partly the reflex of ancestral experiences. Scarcely had this mood passed before a sensation came upon me of being fanned as if by clammy bat-like wings; and then the idea seized me that the crypt scintillated with the eyes of a malignant foe. It was as if the curse which, until I heard Winnie a beggar singing in the street, had been to me but a collocation of maledictory words, harmless save in their effect upon her superstitious mind, had here assumed an actual corporeal shape. In the uncertain light shed by the lantern, I seemed to see the face of this embodied curse with an ever-changing mockery of expression; at one moment wearing the features of my father; at another those of Tom Wynne; at another the leer of the old woman I had seen in Cyril's studio.

'It is an illusion,' I said, as I closed my eyes to shut it out; 'it is an illusion, born of opiate fumes or else of an over-taxed brain and an exhausted stomach.' Yet it disturbed me as much as if my reason had accepted it as real. Against this foe I seemed to be fighting towards my father's coffin as a dreamer lights against a nightmare, and At last I fell over one of the heaps of old Danish bones in a corner of the crypt. The candle fell from my lantern, and I was in darkness. As I sat there I passed into a semi-conscious state. I saw sitting at the apex of a towering pyramid, built of phosphorescent human bones that reached far, far above the stars, the 'Queen of Death, Nin-ki-gal,' scattering seeds over the earth below. At the pyramid's base knelt the suppliant figure of a Sibyl pleading with the Queen of Death:

What answer, O Nin-ki-gal?
Have pity, O Queen of Queens!

And the Sibyl's face was that of Fenella Stanley—her voice was that of Sinfi Lovell.

And then from that dizzy height seemed to come a cackling laugh:—

'You makes me blush, an' blow me if blushin' ain't bin an' made t'other eye dry. I lives in Primrose Court, Great Queen Street, an' 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.'

And now in my vision I perceived that Nin-ki-gal's face was that of the old woman I had seen in Cyril's studio, and that she was dressed in the same fantastic in which Cyril had bedizened her.

VI

I sprang up, struck a light and relit the candle, and soon reached the coffin resting on a stone table. I found, on examining it, that although it had been screwed down after the discovery of the violation, the work had been so loosely done that a few turns of the screwdriver were sufficient to set the lid free. Then I paused; for to raise the loosened lid (knowing as I did that it was only the blood's inherited follies that had conquered my rationalism and induced me to disturb the tomb) seemed to require the strength of a giant. Moreover, the fantastic terror of old Lantoff's story, which at another time would have made me smile, also took bodily shape, and the picture of a dreadful struggle at the edge of the cliff between Winnie's father and mine seemed to hang in the air—a fascinating mirage of ghastly horror.

* * * * *

At last, by an immense effort of will, I closed my eyes and pushed the lid violently on one side.

* * * * *

The 'sweet odours and divers kinds of spices' of the Jewish embalmer rose like a gust of incense—rose and spread through the crypt like the sweet breath of a new-born blessing, till the air of the charnel-house seemed laden with a mingled odour of indescribable sweetness. Never had any odour so delighted my senses; never had any sensuous influence so soothed my soul.

While I stood inhaling the scents of opobalsam, and cinnamon and myrrh, and wine of palm and oil of cedar, and all the other spices of the Pharaohs, mingled in one strange aromatic cloud, my personality seemed again to become, in part, the reflex of ancestral experiences.

I opened my eyes. I looked into the coffin. The face (which had been left by the embalmer exposed) confronted mine. 'Fenella Stanley!' I cried, for the great transfigurer Death had written upon my father's brow that self-same message which the passions of a thousand Romany ancestors had set upon the face of her whose portrait hung in the picture-gallery. And the rubies and diamonds and beryls of the cross as it now hung upon my breast, catching the light of the opened lantern in my left hand, shed over the features an indescribable reflex hue of quivering rose.

Beneath his head I placed the silver casket: I hung the hair-chain round his neck: I laid upon his breast the long-loved memento of his love and the parchment scroll.

Then I sank down by the coffin, and prayed. I knew not what or why. But never since the first human prayer was breathed did there rise to heaven a supplication so incoherent and so wild as mine. Then I rose, and laying my hand upon my father's cold brow, I said: 'You have forgiven me for all the wild words that I uttered in my long agony. They were but the voice of intolerable misery rebelling against itself. You, who suffered so much—who know so well those flames burning at the heart's core—those flames before which all the forces of the man go down like prairie-grass before the fire and wind—you have forgiven me. You who knew the meaning of the wild word Love—you have forgiven your suffering son, stricken like yourself. You have forgiven me, father, and forgiven him, the despoiler of your tomb: you have removed the curse, and his child—his innocent child—is free.'

I replaced the coffin-lid, and screwing it down left the crypt, so buoyant and exhilarated that I stopped in the churchyard and asked myself: 'Do I, then, really believe that she was under a curse? Do I really relieve that my restoring the amulet has removed it? Have I really come to this?'

Throughout all these proceedings—yes, even amidst that prayer to Heaven, amidst that impassioned appeal to my dead father—had my reason been keeping up that scoffing at my heart which I have before described.

I knocked up the landlord of the 'White Hart,' and, turning into bed, slept my first peaceful sleep since my trouble.

To escape awkward questions, I did not in the morning take back the keys to Shales's house myself, but sent them, and walking to Dullingham took the train to London.

X

BEHIND THE VEIL

I

When I met my mother at the solicitor's office next day, she was astonished at my cheerfulness and at the general change in me. As we left the office together, she said,

'Everything is now arranged: your aunt and I have decided to accept Lord Sleaford's invitation to go for a cruise in his yacht. We leave to-morrow evening. Lord Sleaford has promised to take me to-morrow afternoon to Mr. Wilderspin's studio, to see the great painter's portrait of me, which is now, I understand, quite finished.'

'Why did you not ask me to accompany you, instead of asking
Sleaford?'

'I did not know that you would care to do so.' 'Dear mother,' I said, in a tender tone that startled her, 'you must let me go with you and Sleaford to the studio.'

She consented, and on the following afternoon I called at my aunt's house in Belgrave Square. The hall was full of portmanteaux, boxes, and packages. Sleaford had already arrived, and was waiting with stolid patience for my mother, who had gone to her room to dress. He began to talk to me about the astonishing gifts of Cyril Aylwin.

'Have you made an appointment with Wilderspin?' I said to my mother, when she entered the room. 'The last time I saw him he seemed to be much occupied with some disturbing affairs of his own.'

'Appointment? No,' said she, with an air that seemed to imply that an Aylwin, even with Gypsy blood in his veins, in calling upon Art, was conferring upon it a favour to be welcomed at any time.

'I have not seen this portrait yet,' said Sleaford, as the carriage moved off; 'but Cyril Aylwin says it is magnificent, and if anybody knows what's good and what's bad it's Cyril Aylwin.'

'Do you know,' said my mother to me, 'I have taken vastly to this eccentric kinsman of ours? I had really no idea that a bohemian could be so much like a gentleman; but, of course, an Aylwin must always be an Aylwin.'

'Haw, haw!' laughed Sleaford to himself, 'that's good about Cyril
Aylwin though—that's dooced good.'

'We shall see Wilderspin's great picture, "Faith and Love," at the same time,' I said, as we approached Chelsea; 'for Wilderspin tells me that he has borrowed it from the owner to make a replica of it.'

'That is very fortunate,' said my mother. 'I have the greatest desire to see this picture and its wonderful predella. Wilderspin is one of the few painters who revert to the predella of the old masters. He is said to combine the colour of him whom he calls "his master" with the draughtsmanship and intellect of Shields, whose stained-glass windows the owner was showing me the other day at Eaton Hall; and do you know, Henry, that the painter of this wonderful "Faith and Love" is never tired of declaring that the subject was inspired by your dear father?'

When we reached the studio the servant said that Mr. Wilderspin was much indisposed that afternoon, and was also just getting ready to go to Paris, where he was to join Mr. Cyril in his studio; 'but perhaps he would see us,'—an announcement that brought a severe look to my mother's face, and another half-suppressed 'Haw, haw!' from Sleaford's deep chest.

Mounting the broad old staircase, we found ourselves in the studio of the famous spiritualist-painter—one of two studios; for Wilderspin had turned two rooms communicating with each other by folding-doors into a sort of double studio. One of these rooms, which was of moderate size, fronted the north-east, the other faced the south-west. There were (as I soon discovered) easels in both. It was the smaller of these rooms into which we were now shown by the servant. The walls were covered with sketches and drawings in various stages, and photographs of sculpture.

'By Jove, that's dooced like!' said Sleaford, pointing to my mother's portrait, which was standing on the floor, as though just returned from the frame-maker's: 'ask Cyril Aylwin if it ain't when you see him.'

It was a truly magnificent painting, but more full of imagination than of actual portraiture.

One of the windows was open, and the noise of an anvil from a blacksmith's shop in Maud Street came into the room.

'Do you know,' said my mother in an undertone, 'that this strange genius can only, when in London, work to the sound of a blacksmith's anvil? Nothing will induce him to paint a portrait out of his own studio; and I observed, when I was sitting to him here, that sometimes when the noise from the anvil ceased he laid down his brush and waited for the hideous din to be resumed.

Wilderspin now came through the folding-doors, and greeted us in his usual simple, courteous way. But I saw that he was in trouble. 'The portrait will look better yet,' he said. 'I always leave the final glazing till the picture is in the frame.'

After we had thoroughly examined the portrait, we turned to look at a large canvas upon an easel. Wilderspin had evidently been working upon it very lately.

'That's "Ruth and Boaz," don't you know?' said Sleaford. 'Finest crop of barley I ever saw in my life, judgin' from the size of the sheaves. Barley paid better than wheat last year. So the farmers all say.'

'Don't look at it,' said Wilderspin. 'I have been taking out part of Ruth, and was just beginning to repaint her from the shoulders upwards. It will never be finished now,' he continued with a sigh.

We asked him to allow us to see 'Faith and Love.'

'It is in the next room,' said he, 'but the predella is here on the next easel. I have removed it from underneath the picture to work upon.'

'The head of Ruth has been taken out,' said my mother, turning to me: 'but isn't it like an old master? You ought to see the marvellous Pre-Raphaelite pictures at Mr. Graham's and Mr. Leyland's, Henry.'

'Pre-Raphaelites?' said Wilderspin, 'the Master rhymes, madam, and Burne-Jones actually reads the rhymes! However, they are on the right track in art, though neither has the slightest intercourse with the spirit world, not the slightest.'

'My exploits as a painter have not been noticeable as yet,' I said; 'but an amateur may know what a barley-field is. That is one before us. He may know what a man in love is; Boaz there is in love.'

'I wish we could see the woman's face,' said Sleaford. 'A woman, you know, without a face—'

'Come and see the predella of "Faith and Love,"' said Wilderspin, and he moved towards an easel where rested the predella, a long narrow picture without a frame. My mother followed him, leaving me standing before the picture of 'Ruth and Boaz.' Although the head of Ruth had been painted out, the picture seemed to throb with life. Boaz had just discovered the Moabitish maiden in the gleaming barley-field, as she had risen from stooping to glean the corn. Two ears of barley were in one hand. In the face of Boaz was an expression of surprise, and his eyes were alight with admiration. The picture was finished with the exception of the face of Ruth, which was but newly sketched in. Wilderspin had contrived to make her attitude and even the very barley-ears in her hand (one of which was dangling between her slender fingers in the act of falling) express innocent perturbation and girlish modesty.

II

At length I joined the others, who were standing before the easel, looking at the predella which, as Wilderspin again took care to tell us, had been removed from the famous picture of 'Faith and Love' we were about to see in the next room—'the culmination and final expression of the Renascence of Wonder in Art.'

'Perhaps it is fortunate,' said he, 'that I happen to be working at this very time upon the predella, which acts as a key to the meaning of the design. You will now have the advantage of seeing the predella before you see the picture itself. And really it would be to the advantage of the picture if every one could see it under like circumstances; it would add immensely to the effect of the design. Look well and carefully at the predella first. Try to imagine the Oriental Queen behind that veil, then observe the way in which the features are expressed through the veil; and then, but not till then, come into the adjoining room and see the picture itself, see what Isis really is (according to the sublime idea of Philip Aylwin) when Faith and Love, the twin angels of all true art, upraise the veil.'

He then turned and passed through the folding-doors into a room of great size, crowded with easels, upon which pictures were resting.

The predella before me seemed a miracle of imaginative power. At that time I had not seen the work of the great poet-painter of modern times whom Wilderspin called 'the Master,' and by whom he had been unconsciously inspired.

'Most beautiful!' my mother ejaculated, as we three lingered before the predella. 'Do look at the filmy texture of the veil.'

'Looks more like steam than a white veil, don't you know?' said
Sleaford.

'Like steam, my lord?' exclaimed Wilderspin from the next room. 'The painter of that veil had peculiar privileges. As a child he had been in the habit of watching a face through the curtain of steam around a blacksmith's forge when hot iron is plunged into the water-trench, and the face, my lord, though begrimed by earthly toil, was an angel's. No wonder, then, that the painting in that veil is unique in art. The flesh-tints that are pearly and yet rosy seem, as you observe, to be breaking through it, and yet you cannot say what is the actual expression on the face. But now come and see the picture itself.'

My mother and Sleaford lingered for a moment longer, and then passed between the folding-doors.

But I did not follow them; I could not. For now there was something in the predella before me which fascinated me, I scarcely knew why. It was the figure of the queen—the figure between the two sleeping angels—the figure behind the veil, and expressed by the veil—that enthralled me.

There was a turn about the outlined neck and head that riveted my gaze; and, as I looked from these to the veil falling over the face, a vision seemed to be rapidly growing before my eyes—a vision that stopped my breath—a vision of a face struggling to express itself through that snowy film—whose face?

* * * * *

'In the crypt my senses had a kind of license to play me tricks,' I murmured; 'but now and here my reason shall conquer.'

And I stood and gazed at the veil. During all the time I could hear every word of the talk between Wilderspin, Sleaford, and my mother before the picture in the other room.

'Awfully fine picture,' said Sleaford, 'but the Queen there—Isis: more like a European face than an Egyptian. I've been to Egypt a good deal, don't you know?'

'This is not an historical painting, my lord. As Philip Aylwin says, "the only soul-satisfying function of art is to give what Zoroaster calls 'apparent pictures of unapparent realities.'" Perfect beauty has no nationality; hers has none. All the perfections of woman culminate in her. How can she then be disfigured by paltry characteristics of this or that race or nation? In looking at that group, my lord, nationality is forgotten, and should be forgotten. She is the type of Ideal Beauty whose veil can never be raised save by the two angels of all true art, Faith and Love. She is the type of Nature, too, whose secret, as Philip Aylwin says, "no science but that of Faith and Love can read."'

'Seems to be the type of a good deal; but it's all right, don't you know? Awfully fine picture! Awfully fine woman!' said Sleaford in a conciliatory tone. 'She's a good deal fairer, though, than any Eastern women I've seen; but then I suppose she has worn a veil al her life up to now. Most of 'em take sly peeps, and let in the hot Oriental sun, and that tans 'em, don't you know?'

'And the original of this face?' I heard my mother say in a voice that seemed agitated; 'could you tell me something about the original of this remarkable face?' 'The model?' said Wilderspin. 'We are not often asked about our models, but a model like that would endow mediocrity itself with genius, for, though apparently, and by way of beneficent illusion, the daughter of an earthly costermonger, she was a wanderer from another and a better world. She is not more beautiful here than when I saw her first in the sunlight on that memorable day, at the corner of Essex Street, Strand, bare-headed, her shoulders shining like patches of polished ivory here and there through the rents in her tattered dress, while she stood gazing before her, murmuring a verse of Scripture, perfectly unconscious whether she was dressed in rags or velvet; her eyes—'

'The eyes—it is the eyes, don't you know—it is the eyes that are not quite right,' said Sleaford. 'Blue eyes with black eyelashes are awfully fine; you don't see 'em in Egypt. But I suppose that's the type of something too. Types always floor me, don't you know?'

'But the scene is no longer Egypt, my lord; it is Corinth,' replied
Wilderspin.

During this dialogue I stood motionless before the predella: I could not stir; my feet seemed fixed in the floor by what can only be described as a wild passion of expectation. As I stood there a marvellous change appeared to be coming over the veiled figure of the predella. The veil seemed to be growing more and more filmy—more and more like the 'steam' to which Sleaford had compared it, till at last it resolved itself into a veil of mist—into the rainbow-tinted vapours of a gorgeous mountain sunrise—and looking straight at me were two blue eyes sparkling with childish happiness and childish greeting, through flushed mists across a pool on Snowdon.

That she was found at last my heart knew, though my brain was dazed. That in the next room, within a few yards of me, my mother and Sleaford and Wilderspin were looking at the picture of Winifred's face unclouded by the veil, my heart knew as clearly as though my eyes were gazing at it, and yet I could not stir. Yes, I knew that she was now neither a beggar in the street, nor a prisoner in one of the dens of London, nor starving in a squalid garret, but was safe under the sheltering protection of a good man. I knew that I had only to pass between those folding-doors to see her in Wilderspin's picture—see her dressed in the 'azure-coloured tunic bordered with stars,' and the upper garment of the 'colour of the moon at moonrise,' which Wilderspin had so vividly described in Wales; and yet, paralysed by expectation, I could not stir.

III

Soon I was conscious that my mother, Sleaford, and Wilderspin were standing by my side, that Wilderspin's hand was laid on my arm, and that I was pointing at the predella—pointing and muttering,

'She lives! She is saved.'

My mother led me into the other studio, and I stood before the great picture. Wilderspin and Sleaford, feeling that something had occurred of a private and delicate nature, lingered out of hearing in the smaller studio.

'I must be taken to her at once,' I muttered to my mother; 'at once.'

So living was the portrait of Winifred that I felt that she must be close at hand. I looked round to see if she herself were not standing by me dressed in the dazzling draperies gleaming from Wilderspin's superb canvas.

But in place of Winifred the profile of my mother's face, cold, proud, and white, met my gaze. Again did the stress of overmastering emotion make of me a child, as it had done on the night of the landslip. 'Mother!' I said, 'you see who it is?'

She made no answer: she stood looking steadfastly at the picture; but the tremor of the nostrils, the long deep breaths she drew, told me of the fierce struggle waging within her breast between conscience and pity, with rage and cruel pride. My old awe of her returned. I was a little boy again, trembling for Winnie. In some unaccountable and, I believe, unprecedented way I had always felt that she, my own mother, belonged to some haughty race superior to mine and Winnie's; and nothing but the intensity of my love for Winnie could ever have caused me to rebel against my mother.

'Dear mother,' I murmured, 'all the mischief and sorrow and pain are ended now; and we shall all be happy; for you have a kind heart, dear, and cannot help loving poor Winnie, when you come to know her.'

She made no answer save that her lips slowly reddened again after the pallor; then came a quiver in them, as though pity were conquering pride within her breast, and then that contemptuous curl that had often in the past cowed the heart of the fearless and pugnacious boy whom no peril of sea or land could appal.

'She is found,' I said. 'And, mother, there is no longer an estrangement between you and me. I forgive you everything now.'

I leapt from her as though I had been stung, so sudden and unexpected was the look of scorn that came over her face as she said, 'You forgive me!' It recalled my struggle with her on that dreadful night: and in a moment I became myself again. The pleading boy became, at a flash, the stern and angry man that misery had made him. With my heart hedged once more with points of steel to all the world but Winnie, I turned away. I did not know then that her attitude towards me at this moment came from the final struggle in her breast between her pride and that remorse which afterwards took possession of her and seemed as though it would make the remainder of her life a tragedy without a smile in it. At that moment Wilderspin and Sleaford came in from the smaller studio. 'Where is she?' I said to Wilderspin. 'Take me to her at once—take me to her who sat for this picture. It is she whom I and Sinfi Lovell were seeking in Wales.'

A look of utter astonishment, then one of painful perplexity, came over his face—a look which I attributed to his having heard part of the conversation between my mother and myself.

'You mean the—the—model? She is not here, Mr. Aylwin,' said he. 'The same young lady you were seeking in Wales! Mysterious indeed are the ways of the spirit world!' and then his lips moved silently as though in prayer.

'Where is she?' I asked again.

'I will tell you all about her soon—when we are alone,' he said in an undertone. 'Does the picture satisfy you?'

The picture! He was thinking of his art. Amid all that gorgeous pageant in which mediæval angels; were mixed with classic youths and flower-crowned; maidens, in such a medley of fantastic beauty as could never have been imagined save by a painter; who was one-third artist, one-third madman, and one-third seer—amid all the marvels of that strange, uncanny culmination of the neo-Romantic movement in Art which had excited the admiration of one set of the London critics and the scorn of others, I had really and fully seen but one face—the face of Isis, or Pelagia, or Eve, or Natura Benigna, or whosoever she was looking at me with those dear eyes of Winnie's which were my very life—looking at me with the same bewitching, indescribable expression that they wore when she sat with her 'Prince of the Mist' on Snowdon. I tried to take in the ensemble. In vain! Nothing but the face and figure of Winifred—crowned with seaweed as in the Raxton photograph—could stay for the thousandth part of a second upon my eyes.

'Wilderspin,' I said, 'I cannot do the picture justice at this moment. I must see it again—after I have seen her. Where is she? Can I not see her now?'

'You cannot.'

'Can I not see her to-day?'

'You cannot. I will tell you soon, and I have much to tell you,' said Wilderspin, looking uneasily round at my mother, who did not seem inclined to leave us. 'I will tell you all about her when—when you are sufficiently calm.'

'Tell me now,' I said.

'Gad! this is a strange affair, don't you know? It would puzzle Cyril
Aylwin himself,' said Sleaford. 'What the dooce does it all mean?'

'Is she safe?' I cried to Wilderspin.

There was a pause.

'Is she safe?' I cried again.

'Quite safe,' said Wilderspin, in a tone whose solemnity would have scared me had the speaker been any other person than this eccentric creature. 'When you are less agitated, I will tell you all about her.'

'No! now, now!'

IV

'Well, Mr. Aylwin,' said Wilderspin, 'when I first saw your father's book, The Veiled Queen, it was the vignette on the title-page that attracted me. In the eyes of that beautiful child-face, even as rendered by a small reproduction, there was the very expression that my soul had been yearning after—the expression which no painter of woman's beauty had ever yet caught and rendered. I felt that he who could design or suggest to a designer such a vignette must be inspired, and I bought the book: it was as an artist, not as a thinker, that I bought the book for the vignette. When, on reading it, I came to understand the full meaning of the design, such sweet comfort and hope did the writer's words give me, that I knew at once who had impressed me to read it—I knew that my mission in life was to give artistic development to the sublime ideas of Philip Aylwin. I began the subject of "Faith and Love." But the more I tried to render the expression that had fascinated me the more impossible did the task seem to me. Howsoever imaginative may be any design, the painter who would produce a living picture must paint from life, and then he has to fight against his model's expression. Do you remember my telling you the other day how the spirit of Mary Wilderspin in heaven came upon me in my sore perplexity and blessed me—sent me a spiritual body—led me out into the street, and—'

'Yes, yes, I remember; but what happened?'

'We will sit,' said Wilderspin.

He placed chairs for us, and I perceived that my mother did not intend to go.

'Well,' he continued, 'on that sunny morning I was impressed to leave my studio and go out into the streets. It was then that I found what I had been seeking,—the expression in the beautiful child-face off the vignette.'

'In the street!' I heard my mother say to herself. 'How did it come about?' she asked aloud.

'It had long been my habit to roam about the streets of London whenever I could afford the time to do so, in the hope of finding what I sought, the fascinating and indescribable expression on that one lovely child-face. Sometimes I believed that I had found this expression. I have followed women for miles, traced them home, introduced myself to them, told them of my longings; and have then, after all, come away in bitter disappointment. The insults and revilings I have, on these occasions, sometimes submitted to I will narrate to no man, for they would bring me no respect in a cynical age like this—an age which Carlyle spits at and the great and good John Ruskin chides. Sometimes my dear friend Mr. Cyril has accompanied me on these occasions, and he has seen how I have been humiliated.'

An involuntary 'haw, haw!' came from Sleaford, but looking towards my mother and perceiving that she was listening with intense eagerness, he said: 'Ten thousand pardons, but Cyril Aylwin's droll stories,—don't you know? they will—hang it all—keep comin' up and makin' a fellow laugh.'

'Well,' continued Wilderspin, 'on that memorable morning I was impressed to walk down the street towards Temple Bar. I was passing close to the wall to escape the glare of the sun, when I was stopped suddenly by a sight which I knew could only have been sent to me in that hour of perplexity by her who had said that Jesus would let her look down and watch her boy. Moreover, at that moment the noise of the Strand seemed to cease in my ears, which were rilled with the music I love best—the only music that I have patience to listen to—the tinkle of a black-smith's anvil.'

'Blacksmith's anvil in the Strand?' said Sleaford.

'It was from heaven, my lord, that the music fell like rain; it was a sign from Mary Wilderspin who lives there.'

'For God's sake be quick!' I exclaimed. 'Where was it?'

'At the corner of Essex Street. A bright-eyed, bright-haired girl in rags was standing bare-headed, holding out boxes of matches for sale, and murmuring words of Scripture. This she was doing quite mechanically, as it seemed, and unobservant of the crowd passing by,—individuals of whom would stop for a moment to look at her; some with eyes of pure admiration and some with other eyes. The squalid attire in which she was clothed seemed to add to her beauty.'

'My poor Winnie!' I murmured, entirely overcome.

'She seemed to take as little heed of the heat and glare as of the people, but stood there looking before her, murmuring texts from Scripture as though she were communing with the spiritual world. Her eyes shook and glittered in the sunshine; they seemed to emit lights from behind the black lashes surrounding them; the ruddy lips were quivering. There was an innocence about her brow, and yet a mystic wonder in her eyes which formed a mingling of the child-like with the maidenly such as—'

'Man! man! would you kill me with your description?' I cried. Then grasping Wilderspin's hand, I said, 'But,—but was she begging, Wilderspin? Not literally begging! My Winnie! my poor Winnie!'

My mother looked at me. The gaze was full of a painful interest; but she recognised that between me and her there now was rolling an infinite sea or emotion, and her eyes drooped before mine as though she had suddenly invaded the privacy of a stranger.

'She was offering matches for sale,' said Wilderspin.

'Winnie! Winnie! Winnie!' I murmured. 'Did she seem emaciated,
Wilderspin? Did she seem as though she wanted food?'

'Heaven, no!' exclaimed my mother.

'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.'

'God bless you, Wilderspin, God 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 shilling, 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 shilling, 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 passed 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 God….You engaged her, Wilderspin, of the woman whom I saw at Cyril's studio, to sit as a model? What passed 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?'

'It was the face of the kind, tender, and noble lady your mother,' said Wilderspin gently.

I gave a hurried glance at my mother, and saw the pallor of her face,—but to me the world held now only two realities, Winifred and Wilderspin; all other people were dreams, obtrusive and irritating dreams. 'Go on, go on,' I said.

'She recovered,' continued Wilderspin, 'and seemed to have forgotten all about the portrait, which I had put away.'

'Did she talk?'

'Never, Mr. Aylwin,' said Wilderspin solemnly. 'Nor did I invite her to talk, knowing whence she came—from the spirit-world. At the first few sittings Mrs. Gudgeon came with her, and would sit looking on with the intention of seeing that she came to no harm. She said her daughter was very beautiful, and she, her mother, never trusted her with men.'

'God bless the hag, God bless her; but go on!'

'Gradually Mrs. Gudgeon seemed to acquire more confidence in me; and one day, on leaving, she lingered behind the girl, and told me that her daughter, though uncommonly stupid and a little touched in the head, had now learnt her way to my studio, and that in future she should let her come alone, as she believed that she could trust her with me. She warned me earnestly, however, not to "worrit" the girl by asking her all sorts of questions.'

'And there she was right,' I cried. 'But you did ask her questions,—I see you did, you asked her about her father and brought on another catastrophe.'

'No,' said Wilderspin with gentle dignity; 'I was careful not to ask her questions, for her mother told me that she was liable to fits.'

'Mr. Wilderspin, I beg your pardon,' I said.

'I see you are deeply troubled,' said he; 'but, Mr. Aylwin, you need not beg my pardon. Since I saw Mary Wilderspin, my mother, die for her children, no words of mere Man have been able to give me pain.'

'Go on, go on. What did the woman say to you?'

'She said, "The fewer questions you ask her the better, and don't pay her any money. She'd only lose it; I'll come for it at the proper times." From that day the model came to the sittings alone, and Mrs. Gudgeon came at the end of every week for the money.'

'And did the model maintain her silence all this time?'

'She did. She would, every few minutes, sink into a reverie, and appear to be stone-deaf. But sometimes her face would become suddenly alive with all sorts of shifting expressions. A few days ago she had another fit, exactly like the former one. That was on the day preceding my call at your hotel with your father's books. This time we had much more difficulty in bringing her round. We did so at last; and when she was gone I gave the final touch to my picture of "The Lady Geraldine and Christabel." I was at the moment, however, at work upon "Ruth and Boaz," which I had painted years before—removing the face of Ruth originally there. I worked long at it; and as she was not coming for two days I kept steadily at the picture. This was the day on which I called upon you, wishing you to postpone your visit, lest you should interrupt me while at work upon the head of Ruth, which I was hoping to paint. On Thursday I waited for her at the appointed hour, but she did not come, and I saw her no more.'

V

'Mr. Wilderspin,' I said, as I rose hurriedly, with the intention of going at once in search of Winifred, 'let me see the picture you allude to—"Christabel," and then tell me where to find her.'

'Better not see it!' said Wilderspin solemnly; 'there's something to tell you yet, Mr. Aylwin.'

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XI

THE IRONY OF HEAVEN

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What do you mean?' I asked again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'You said she was safe!'

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

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

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

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

'No; now, now.'

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

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

'And what then? Answer me quickly.'

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I came to myself I said to the woman,

'You can point out the grave?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'The person tells a lie,' said the woman, with a dogged and sullen look, and in a voice that grew thicker with every word. 'Ain't there sich things as doubles?'

At these last words my heart gave a sudden leap. We left the house, and neither of us spoke till we got into the Strand.

'Did you see the—body at all?' I asked Wilderspin.

'Oh, yes. After I gave her the money for the funeral I went to Primrose Court. The woman took me upstairs, and there on the mattress lay—what the poor woman believed to be the earthly body of an earthly daughter. It was covered with a quilt. Over the face a ragged shawl had been thrown.'

'Yes, yes. She raised the shawl?'

'Yes, the woman went and held the candle over the head of the mattress and uncovered the face; and there lay she whom the woman believed to be her daughter, and whom you believe to be the young lady you seek, but whom I know to be a spiritual body—the perfect type that was sent to me in order that I might fulfil my mission. You groan, Mr. Aylwin, but remember that you have lost only a dream, a beautiful hallucination; I have lost a reality: there is nothing real but the spiritual world.

III

As I wandered about the streets after parting from Wilderspin, what were my emotions? If I could put them into words, is there one human being in ten thousand who would understand me? Happily, no. For there is not one in ten thousand who, having sounded the darkest depths of human misery, will know how strong is Hope when at the true death-struggle with Despair. 'Hope in the human breast,' wrote my father, 'is a passion, a wild, a lawless, and an indomitable passion, that almost no cruelty of Fate can conquer.'

Many a passer-by in the streets of London that night must have asked himself, What lunatic is this at large? At one moment I would bound along the pavement as though propelled by wings, scarcely seeming to touch the pavement with my feet. At the next I would stop in a cold perspiration and say to myself, 'Idiot, is it possible that you, so learned in suffering—you, whom Destiny, or Heaven, or Hell, has taken in hand as a special sport—can befool yourself with Hope now, after the terrible comedy by which you and the ancestral idiots from whom you sprang amused Queen Nin-ki-gal in Raxton crypt?'

Hope and Despair were playing at shuttlecock with my soul. Underneath my misery there flickered a thought which, wild as it was, I dared not dismiss—the thought that, after all, it might not be Winifred who had died in that den. Possible it was—however improbable—that I might be labouring under a delusion. My imagination might have exaggerated a resemblance into actual identity, and Winifred and she whom Wilderspin painted might be two different persons—and there might be hope even yet. But so momentous was the issue to my soul, that the mere fact of having clearly marshalled the arguments on the side of Hope made my reason critical and suspicious of their cogency. From the sweet sophisms that my reason had called up, I turned, and there stood Despair, ready for me behind a phalanx of arguments, which laughed all Hope's 'ragged regiment' to scorn.

Had not my mother recognised her? Could the infallible perceptive faculties of my mother be also deceived?

But to accept the fact that she who died on that mattress was little Winnie of the sands was to go stark mad, and the very instinct of self-preservation made me clutch at every sophism Hope could offer.

'Did not the woman declare that the singing-girl and the model were not one and the same?' said Hope. 'And if she did not lie, may you not have been, after all, hunting a shadow through London?'

'It might not have been Winifred,' I shouted.

But no sooner had I done so than the scene in the studio—Wilderspin's story of the model's terror on seeing my mother's portrait—came upon me, and 'Dead! dead!' rang through me like a funeral knell: all the superstructure of Hope's sophisms was shattered in a moment like a house of cards: my imagination flew away to all the London graveyards I had ever heard of; and there, in the part divided by the pauper line, my soul hovered over a grave newly made, and then dived down from coffin to coffin, one piled above another, till it reached Winifred, lying pressed down by the superincumbent mass; those eyes staring.

Yes; that night I was mad!

I could not walk fatigue into my restless limbs. Morning broke in curdling billows of fire over the east of London—which even at this early hour was slowly growing hazy with smoke. I found myself in Primrose Court, looking at that squalid door, those squalid windows. I knocked at the door. No answer came to my summons, and I knocked again and again. Then a window opened above my head, and I heard the well-known voice of the woman exclaiming,

'Who's that? Poll Onion's out to-night, and the rooms are emp'y 'cept mine. Why, God bless me, man, is it you?'

'Hag! that was not your daughter.'

She slammed the window down.

'Let me in, or I will break the door.'

The window was opened again.

'Lucky as I didn't leave the front door open to-night, as I mostly do. What do you want to skear a pore woman for?' she bawled. 'Go away, else I'll call up the people in Great Queen Street.'

'Mrs. Gudgeon, all I want to do is to ask you a question.'

'Ah, but that's what you jis' won't do, my fine gentleman. I don't let you in again in a hurry.'

'I will give you a sovereign.'

'Honour bright?' bawled the old woman; 'let me look at it.'

'Here it is, in my hand.'

'Jink it on the stuns.'

I threw it down.

'Quid seems to jink all right, anyhow,' she said, 'though I'm more used to the jink of a tanner than a quid in these cussed times. You won't skear me if I come down?'

'No, no.'

At last I heard her fumbling inside at the lock, and then the door opened.

'Why, man alive! your eyes are afire jist like a cat's wi' drownded kitlins.'

'She was not your daughter.'

'Not my darter?' said she, as she stooped to pick up the sovereign. 'You ain't a-goin' to catch me the likes o' that. The Beauty not my darter! All the court knows she was my own on'y darter. I'll swear afore all the beaks in London as I'm the mother of my own on'y darter Winifred, allus' wur 'er mother, and allus wull be; an' if she went a-beggin' it worn't my fort. She liked beggin', poor dear; some gals does.'

'Her name Winifred!' I cried, with a pang at my heart as sharp as though there had been a reasonable hope till now.

'In course her name was Winifred.'

'Liar! How came she to be called Winifred?'

'Well, I'm sure! Mayn't a Welshman's wife give her own on'y Welsh darter a Welsh name? Us poor folks is come to somethink! P'raps you'll say I ain't a Welshman's wife next? It's your own cussed lot as killed her, ain't it? What did I tell the shiny Quaker when fust I tookt her to the studero? I sez to the shiny un, "She's jist a bit touched here," I sez' (tapping her own head), '"and nothink upsets her so much as to be arsted a lot o' questions," I sez to the shiny un. "The less you talks to her," I sez, "the better you'll get on with her," I sez, "and the better kind o' pictur you'll make out on her," I sez to the shiny un; "an' don't you go an' arst who her father is," I sez, "for that word 'ull bring such a horful look on her face," I sez, "as is enough to skear anybody to death. I sha'n't forget the look the fust time I seed it," I sez. That's what I sez to the shiny Quaker. An' yit you did go an' worrit 'er, a-arstin' 'er a lot o' questions about 'er father. You did—I know you did! You must 'a done it—so no lies; for that wur the on'y thing as ever skeared 'er, arstin' 'er about 'er father, pore dear….Why, man alive! what are you a-gurnin' at? an' what are you a-smackin' your forred wi' your 'and like that for, an' a-gurnin' in my face like a Chessy cat? Blow'd if I don't b'lieve you're drunk. An' who the dickens are you a-callin' a fool, Mr. Imperance?'

It was not the woman but myself I was cursing when I cried out,
'Fool! besotted fool!'

Not till now had the wild hope fled which had led me back to the den. As I stood shuddering on the doorstep in the cold morning light, while the whole unbearable truth broke in upon me, I could hear my lips murmuring,

'Fool of ancestral superstitions! Fenella Stanley's fool! Philip Aylwin's fool! Where was the besotted fool and plaything of besotted ancestors, when the truth was burning so close beneath his eyes that it is wonderful they were not scorched into recognising it? Where was he when, but for superstitions grosser than those of the negroes on the Niger banks, he might have saved the living heart and centre of his little world? Where was the rationalist when, but for superstitions sucked in with his mother's milk, he would have gone to a certain studio, seen a certain picture which would have sent him on the wings of the wind to find and rescue and watch over the one for whom he had renounced all the ties of kindred? Where was then the most worthy descendant of a line of ancestral idiots—Romany and Gorgio—stretching back to the days when man's compeers, the mammoth and the cave-bear, could have taught him better? Rushing down to Raxton church to save her!—to save her by laying a poor little trinket upon a dead man's breast!'

After the paroxysm of self-scorn had partly exhausted itself, I stood staring in the woman's face.

'Well,' said she, 'I thought the shiny Quaker was a rum un, but blow me if you ain't a rummyer.

'Her name was Winifred, and the word "father" produced fits,' I said, not to the woman, but to my soul, in mocking answer to its own woe. 'What about my father's spiritualism now? Good God! Is there no other ancestral tomfoolery, no other of Superstition's patent Aylwinian soul-salves for the philosophical Nature-worshipper and apostle of rationalism to fly to? Her name was Winifred.

'Yis; don't I say 'er name wur Winifred?' said the woman, who thought I was addressing her. 'You're jist like a poll-parrit with your "Winifred, Winifred, Winifred." That was 'er name, an' she 'ad a shock, pore dear, an' it was all along of you at the studero a-talkin' about 'er father. You must a-talked about 'er father: so no lies. She 'ad fits arter that, in course she 'ad. Why, you'll make me die a-larfin' with your poll-parritin' ways, sayin' "a shock, a shock, a shock," arter me. In course she 'ad a shock; she 'ad it when she was a little gal o' six. My pore Bill (that's my 'usband as now lives in the fine 'Straley) was a'most killed a-fightin' a Irishman. They brought 'im 'um an' laid 'im afore her werry eyes, an' the sight throw'd 'er into high-strikes, an' arter that the name of "father" allus throwed her into high-strikes, an' that's why I told 'em at the studero never to say that word. An' I know you must 'a' said it, some o' your cussed lot must, or else why should my pore darter 'a' 'ad the high-strikes? Nothin' else never gev 'er no high-strikes only talkin' to 'er about 'er father. An' as to me a-sendin' 'er a-beggin', I tell you she liked beggin'. I gev her baskets to sell, an' flowers to sell, an' yet she would beg. I tell you she liked beggin'. Some gals does. She was touched in the 'ead, an' she used to say she must beg, an' there was nothink she used to like so much as to stan' with a box o' matches a-jabberin' a tex' out o' the Bible unless it was singin'. There you are, a-larfin' and a-gurnin' ag'in. If I wur on'y 'arf as drunk as you are the coppers 'ud 'a' run me in hours ago; cuss 'em, an' their favouritin' ways.'

At the truth flashing in upon me through these fantastic lies, I had passed into that mood when the grotesque wickedness of Fate's awards can draw from the victim no loud lamentations—when there are no frantic blows aimed at the sufferer's own poor eyeballs till the beard—like the self-mutilated Theban king's—is bedewed with a dark hail-shower of blood. More terrible because more inhuman than the agony imagined by the great tragic poet is that most awful condition of the soul into which I had passed—when the cruelty that seems to work at Nature's heart, and to vitalise a dark universe of pain, loses its mysterious aspect and becomes a mockery; when the whole vast and merciless scheme seems too monstrous to be confronted save by mad peals of derisive laughter—that dreadful laughter which bubbles lower than the fount of tears—that laughter which is the heart's last language; when no words can give it the relief of utterance—no words, nor wails, nor moans.

'Another quid,' bawled the woman after me, as I turned away, 'another quid, an' then I'll tell you somethink to your awantage. Out with it, and don't spile a good mind.'

What I did and said that morning as I wandered through the streets of London in that state of tearless despair and mad unnatural merriment, one hour of which will age a man more than a decade of any woe that can find a voice in lamentations, remains a blank in my memory.

I found myself at the corner of Essex Street, staring across the Strand, which, even yet, had scarcely awoke into life. Presently I felt my sleeve pulled, and heard the woman's voice.

'You didn't know as I was cluss behind you all the while, a-watchin' your tantrums. Never spile a good mind, my young swell. Out with t'other quid, an' then I'll tell you somethink about my pootty darter as is on my mind.'

I gave her money, but got nothing from her save more incoherent lies and self-contradictions about the time of the funeral.

'Point out the spot where she used to stand and beg. No, don't stand on it yourself, but point it out.'

'This is the werry spot. She used to hold out her matches like this 'ere,—my darter used,—an' say texes out o' the Bible. She loved beggin', pore dear!'

'Texts from the Bible?' I said, staggering under a new thought that seemed to strike through me like a bar of hot metal. 'Can you remember any one of them?'

'It was allus the same tex', an' I ought to remember it well enough, for I've 'eerd it times enough. She wur like you for poll-parritin' ways, and used to say the same thing over an' over ag'in. It wur allus, "Let his children be wagabones and beg their bread; let them seek it also out of desolate places." Why, you're at it ag'in—gurnin' ag'in. You must be drunk.'

Again there came upon me the involuntary laughter of heart-agony at its tensest. I cried aloud: 'Faith and Love! Faith and Love! That farce of the Raxton crypt with the great-grandmother's fool on his knees shall be repeated for the delight of Nin-ki-gal and the Danish skeletons and the ancestral ghosts from Hugh the Crusader down to the hero of the knee-caps and mittens; and there shall be a dance of death and a song, and the burden shall be—

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods:
They kill us for their sport.'

Misery had made me a maniac at last; my brain swam, and the head of the woman seemed to be growing before me—seemed once more to be transfigured before me into a monstrous mountainous representation of an awful mockery-goddess and columbine-queen, down whose merry wrinkles were flowing tears that were at once tears of Olympian laughter and tears of the oceanic misery of Man.

'Well, you are a rum un, and no mistake,' said the woman. 'But who the dickens are you? That's what licks me. Who the dickens are you? Howsomever, if you'll fork out another quid, the Queen of the Jokes'll tell you some'ink to your awantage, an' if you won't fork out the Queen o' the Jokes is mum.'

I stood and looked at her—looked till the street seemed to heave under my feet and the houses to rock. After this I seem to have wandered back to Wilderspin's studio, and there to have sunk down unconscious.