Aylwin eBook

Theodore Watts-Dunton
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 645 pages of information about Aylwin.

Aylwin eBook

Theodore Watts-Dunton
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 645 pages of information about Aylwin.

‘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.

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Project Gutenberg
Aylwin from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.