For a few days I paced with Sinfi over Wimbledon Common and Richmond
Park, The weather was now unusually brilliant for the time of year.
Sinfi would walk silently by my side.
But I could not rest with the Gypsies. I must be alone. Soon I left the camp and returned to London, where I took a suite of rooms in a house not far from Eaton Square—though to me London was a huge meaningless maze of houses clustered around Primrose Court—that horrid, fascinating, intolerable core of pain. Into my lungs poured the hateful atmosphere of the city where Winifred had perished; poured hot and stifling as sand-blasts of the desert. Impossible to stay there!—for the pavement seemed actually to scorch my feet, like the floor of a fiery furnace. To me the sun above was but the hideous eye of Circumstance which had stared down pitilessly on that bare head of hers, and blistered those feet.
The lamps at night seemed twinkling, blinking in a callous consciousness of my tragedy—my monstrous tragedy of real life, the like of which no poet dare imagine. But what aroused my wrath to an unbearable pitch—what determined me to leave London at once—was the sight of the unsympathetic faces in the streets. Though sympathy could have given me no comfort, the myriad unsympathetic eyes of London infuriated me.
'Died in beggar's rags—died in a hovel!' I muttered with rage as the equipages and coarse splendours of the West End rolled insolently by. 'Died in a hovel!—and this London, this vast, ridiculous, swarming human ant-hill, whose millions of paltry humdrum lives were not worth one breath from those lips—this London spurned her, left her to perish alone in her squalor and misery.'
Cyril and Wilderspin had returned to the Continent. D'Arcy was still away.
I made application to the Home Secretary to have the pauper grave opened. On the ground that I was 'not a relative of the deceased,' the officials refused to institute even preliminary inquiries.
During this time no news of Mrs. Gudgeon had come to me through Polly Onion, and I determined to go to Primrose Court and see what had become of her.
When I reached Primrose Court I found that the shutters of the house were up. Knocking and getting no response, I ascertained from a pot-boy who was passing the corner of the court that Mrs. Gudgeon had decamped. Neither the pot-boy nor any one in the court could tell me whither she was gone.
'But where is Polly Onion?' I asked anxiously; for I was beginning to blame myself bitterly for having neglected them.
'I can tell you where poor Polly is,' said the pot-boy. 'She's in the
New North Cemetery. She fell downstairs and broke her neck.'