It was not
upon her eyes, however, that Winifred's were fixed: it was upon the
lady's bosom, for out from beneath the partially-loosened robes that
covered that bosom a tiny fork of flame was flickering like a
serpent's tongue ruddy from the fires of a cruel and monstrous hate
within.
This sight was dreadful enough; but it was not the terror on
Winifred's face that now sent me reeling against Sleaford, who with
my mother had followed me into the smaller room. Whose figure was
that, and whose was the face which at first I had half-recognised in
the Lady Geraldine? My mother's!
In painting this subject Wilderspin had, without knowing it, worked
with too strong a reminiscence of my mother's portrait, unconscious
that he was but giving expression to the awful irony of Heaven.
I turned round. Wilderspin was supporting with difficulty my mother's
dead weight. For the first time (as I think) in her life, she whom,
until I came to know Sinfi Lovell, I had believed to be the
strongest, proudest, bravest woman living, had fainted.
'Dear me!' said Wilderspin, 'I had no idea that Christabel's terror
was so strongly rendered,--no idea! Art should never produce an
effect like this.
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