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.'