I
On reaching London I resumed my wanderings through the London
streets. Bitter as these wanderings were, my real misery now did not
begin until I got to bed. Then began the terrible struggle of the
soul that wrestles with its ancestral fleshly prison--that prison
whose warders are the superstitions of bygone ages. 'Have you not
seen the curse literally fulfilled?' ancestral voices of the
blood--voices Romany and Gorgio--seemed whispering in my ears. 'Have
you not heard the voice of his daughter upon whose head the curse of
your dead father has fallen a beggar in the street, while not all
your love can succour her or reach her?'
And then my soul would cry out in its agony, 'Most true, Fenella
Stanley--most true, Philip Aylwin; but before I will succumb to such
a theory of the universe as yours, a theory which reason laughs at
and which laughs at reason, I will die--die by this hand of mine:
this flesh that imprisons me in a world of mocking delusion shall be
destroyed, but first the symbol itself of your wicked, cruel old
folly shall go.'
I would then leap from my bed, light a candle, unlock my cabinet,
take out the cross, and holding it aloft prepare to dash it against
the wall, when my hand would be arrested by the same ancestral
voices, Romany and Gorgio, whispering in my ears and at my heart,
'If you break that amulet, how shall you ever be able to see what
would be the effect upon Winnie's fate of its restoration to your
father's tomb?'
And then I would laugh aloud and mock the voices of Fenella Stanley
and Philip Aylwin and millions of other voices that echoed or
murmured or bellowed through half a million years, echoed or murmured
or bellowed from European halls and castles, from Gypsy tents, from
caves of palæolithic man.
'How shall you stay the curse from working in the blood of the
accursed one?' the voices would say. And then I would laugh again
till I feared the people in the hotel would hear me and take me for a
maniac.
But then my aunt's picture of a beggar-girl standing in the rain
would fill my eyes and the whispers would grow louder than the voice
of the North Sea in the March wind: 'Look at _that_. How dare you
leave undone anything, howsoever wild, which might seem to any
one--even to an illiterate Gypsy, even to a crazy mystic--a means of
finding Winifred? What is the meaning of the great instinct which has
always conquered the soul in its direst need--which has always driven
man when in the grip of unbearable calamity to believe in powers that
are unseen? What though that scientific reason of yours tells you
that Winifred's misfortunes have nothing to do with any curse? what
though your reason tells you that all these calamities may be read as
being the perfectly natural results of perfectly natural causes? Is
the voice of man's puny reason clothed with such authority that it
dares to answer his heart, which knows nothing but that it bleeds?
The terrible facts of the case may be read in two ways. With an
inscrutable symmetry these facts may and do fit in with the universal
theory of the power of the spirit-world to execute a curse from the
grave. Look at that beggar in the street! How dare you ignore the
theory of the sorrowing soul, the logic of the lacerated heart, even
though your reason laughs it to scorn?'
And then at last my laughter would turn to moans, and, replacing the
cross in the cabinet, I would creep hack to my bed ashamed, like a
guilty thing--ashamed before myself.
But the more I felt at my throat the claws of the ancestral ogre
Superstition, the more enraged I became with myself for feeling them
there. And the auger against my ancestors' mysticism grew with the
growing consciousness that I was rapidly yielding to the very same
mysticism myself. And then I would get up again and take from my
escritoire the sheaf of Fenella Stanley's letters which I had brought
from Raxton, and read again those stories about curses, such as that
about the withering of a Romany family under a dead man's curse which
Winnie had described to me that night on the sands.