My mother retired to her room immediately on our return to the house.
My uncle stayed till just before dinner, and then left. I seemed to
be alone in a deserted house, so still were the servants, so quiet
seemed everything. But now what was this sense of undefined dread
that came upon me and would not let me rest? Why did I move from room
to room? and what was goading me? Something was stirring like a blind
creature across my brain, and it was too hideous to confront. Why
_should_ I confront it? Why scare one's soul and lacerate one's heart
at every dark fear that peeps through the door of imagination, when
experience teaches us that out of every hundred such dark fears
ninety-nine are sure to turn out mere magic-lantern bogies?
The evening wore on, and yet I _would_ not face this phantom fear,
though it refused to quit me.
The servants went to bed quite early that night, and when the butler
came to ask me if I should 'want anything more,' I said 'only a
candle,' and went up to my bedroom.
'I will turn into bed,' I said, 'and sleep over it. The idea is a
figment of an over-wrought brain. Destiny would never play any man a
trick like that which I have dared to dream of. Among human
calamities it would be at once the most shocking and the most
whimsical--this imaginary woe that scares me. Destiny is merciless,
but who ever heard of Destiny playing mere cruel practical jokes upon
man? Up to now the Fates have never set up as humorists. Now, for a
man to love, to dote upon, a girl whose father is the violator of his
own father's tomb--a wretch who has called down upon himself the most
terrible curse of a dead man that has ever been uttered--_that_ would
be a fate too fantastically cruel to be permitted by Heaven--by any
governing power whose sanctions were not those of a whimsical
cruelty.'
Yet those words of my mother's about Wynne, and her suspicions of
him, were flitting about the air of the room like fiery-eyed bats.
The air of the room--ah! it was stifling me. I opened the window and
leant out. But that made matters a thousand times worse, for the moon
was now at the very full, and staring across--staring at
what?--staring across the sea at the tall tower of the old church on
the cliff, where perhaps the sin--the 'unpardonable sin,' according
to Cymric ideas--of sacrilege--sacrilege committed by _her_ father
upon the grave of mine--might at this moment be going on. The body of
the church was hidden from me by the intervening trees, and nothing
but the tall tower shone in the silver light. So intently did the
moon stare at it, that it seemed to me that the inside of the church,
with its silent aisles, arches, and tombs, was reflected on her disc.
The moon oppressed me, and when I turned my eyes away I seemed to see
hanging in the air the silent aisles of a church, through whose
windows the moonlight was pouring, flooding them with a radiance more
ghastly than darkness, concentrating all its light on the chancel,
beneath which I knew that my father was lying in the dark crypt with
a cross on his breast. I turned for relief to look in the room, and
there, in the darkness made by the shadow of the bed, I seemed to
read, written in pale, trembling flame, the words:
'LET THERE BE NO MAN TO PITY HIM, NOR TO HAVE COMPASSION UPON HIS
FATHERLESS CHILDREN....LET HIS CHILDREN BE VAGABONDS, AND BEG THEIR
BREAD: LET THEM SEEK IT ALSO OUT OF DESOLATE PLACES.'