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.

‘There ain’t much fault to be found with a woman like Meg Gudgeon,’ said Sinfi.  ‘Was the Beauty fond o’ her?  She ought to ha’ bin.’

‘She used to call her Knocker,’ said the girl.  ’She seemed very fond of her when they were together, but seemed to forget her as soon as they were apart.’

Sinfi and I then left the house.

In Great Queen Street she took my hand as if to bid me good-bye.  But she stood and gazed at me wistfully, and I gazed at her.  At last she said,

‘An’ now, brother, we’ll jist go across to Kingston Vale, an’ see my daddy, an’ set your livin’-waggin to rights.’

‘Then, Sinfi,’ I said, ‘you and I are once more—­’

I stopped and looked at her.  The fearless young Amazon and seeress, who kept a large family of the Kaulo Camloes in awe, was supposed to have nearly conquered the feminine weakness of tears; but she had not.  There was a chink in the Amazon’s armour, and I had found it.

‘Yis,’ said she, nodding her head and smiling.  ‘You an’ me’s right pals ag’in.’

As we were going I told her how I had replaced the jewel in the tomb.

’I know’d you would do it.  Yis, I heer’d you telling the gravedigger the same thing.’

‘And yet,’ said I bitterly, ’in spite of that and in spite of the Golden Hand, she is dead.’

Sinfi stood silently looking at me now.  Even her prodigious faith seemed conquered.

IV

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.’

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Project Gutenberg
Aylwin from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.