“Ah! I knew he had that; he wasn’t a healthy man; he used to smoke too much. Marta used always to be very anxious.”
Just then Marta came in.
Marta was a fat, elderly Jewess of rather a grotesque and ignoble type. She seemed overcome with grief—all but prostrate.
Trilby hugged and kissed her, and took off her bonnet and shawl, and made her sit down in a big armchair, and got her a footstool.
She couldn’t speak a word of anything but Polish and a little German. Trilby had also picked up a little German, and with this and by means of signs, and no doubt through a long intimacy with each other’s ways, they understood each other very well. She seemed a very good old creature, and very fond of Trilby, but in mortal terror of the three Englishmen.
Lunch was brought up for the two women and the nurse, and our friends left them, promising to come again that day.
They were utterly bewildered; and the Laird would have it that there was another Madame Svengali somewhere, the real one, and that Trilby was a fraud—self-deceived and self-deceiving—quite unconsciously so, of course.
Truth looked out of her eyes, as it always had done—truth was in every line of her face.
The truth only—nothing but the truth could ever be told in that “voice of velvet,” which rang as true when she spoke as that of any thrush or nightingale, however rebellious it might be now (and forever perhaps) to artificial melodic laws and limitations and restraints. The long training it had been subjected to had made it “a wonder, a world’s delight,” and though she might never sing another note, her mere speech would always be more golden than any silence, whatever she might say.
Except on the one particular point of her singing, she had seemed absolutely sane—so, at least, thought Taffy, the Laird, and Little Billee. And each thought to himself, besides, that this last incarnation of Trilbyness was quite the sweetest, most touching, most endearing of all.
They had not failed to note how rapidly she had aged, now that they had seen her without her rouge and pearl-powder; she looked thirty at least—she was only twenty-three.
Her hands were almost transparent in their waxen whiteness; delicate little frosty wrinkles had gathered round her eyes; there were gray streaks in her hair; all strength and straightness and elasticity seemed to have gone out of her with the memory of her endless triumphs (if she really was la Svengali), and of her many wanderings from city to city all over Europe.
It was evident enough that the sudden stroke which had destroyed her power of singing had left her physically a wreck.
But she was one of those rarely gifted beings who cannot look or speak or even stir without waking up (and satisfying) some vague longing that lies dormant in the hearts of most of us, men and women alike; grace, charm, magnetism—whatever the nameless seduction should be called that she possessed to such an unusual degree—she had lost none of it when she lost her high spirits, her buoyant health and energy, her wits!
Tuneless and insane, she was more of a siren than ever—a quite unconscious siren—without any guile, who appealed to the heart all the more directly and irresistibly that she could no longer stir the passions.
All this was keenly felt by all three—each in his different way—by Taffy and Little Billee especially.
All her past life was forgiven—her sins of omission and commission! And whatever might be her fate—recovery, madness, disease, or death—the care of her till she died or recovered should be the principal business of their lives.
Both had loved her. All three, perhaps. One had been loved by her as passionately, as purely, as unselfishly as any man could wish to be loved, and in some extraordinary manner had recovered, after many years, at the mere sudden sight and sound of her, his lost share in our common inheritance—the power to love, and all its joy and sorrow; without which he had found life not worth living, though he had possessed every other gift and blessing in such abundance.
“Oh, Circe, poor Circe, dear Circe, divine enchantress that you were!” he said to himself, in his excitable way. “A mere look from your eyes, a mere note of your heavenly voice, has turned a poor, miserable, callous brute back into a man again! and I will never forget it—never! And now that a still worse trouble than mine has befallen you, you shall always be first in my thoughts till the end!”
And Taffy felt pretty much the same, though he was not by way of talking to himself so eloquent about things as Little Billee.
As they lunched, they read the accounts of the previous evening’s events in different papers, three or four of which (including the Times) had already got leaders about the famous but unhappy singer who had been so suddenly widowed and struck down in the midst of her glory. All these accounts were more or less correct. In one paper it was mentioned that Madame Svengali was under the roof and care of Mr. William Bagot, the painter, in Fitzroy Square.
The inquest on Svengali was to take place that afternoon, and also Gecko’s examination at the Bow Street Police Court, for his assault.
Taffy was allowed to see Gecko, who was remanded till the result of the postmortem should be made public. But beyond inquiring most anxiously and minutely after Trilby, and betraying the most passionate concern for her, he would say nothing, and seemed indifferent as to his own fate.
When they went to Fitzroy Square, late in the afternoon, they found that many people, musical, literary, fashionable, and otherwise (and many foreigners), had called to inquire after Madame Svengali, but no one had been admitted to see her. Mrs. Godwin was much elated by the importance of her new lodger.
Trilby had been writing to Angèle Boisse, at her old address in the Rue
