Chapter XIV: Introduction: To the Snowdon Edition of 1901 (11)

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.