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.