Nor king nor slave I know,
Nor tribes, nor shibboleths;
But Life-in-Death I know--
Yea, Nin-ki-gal I know--
Life's Queen and Death's.
And what was the effect upon me of these communings with the
ancestors whose superstitions I have, perhaps, been throughout this
narrative treating in a spirit that hardly becomes their descendant?
The best and briefest way of answering this question is to confess
not what I thought, as I went on studying my father's book, its
strange theories and revelations, but what I did. I read the book all
day long: I read it all the next day. I cannot say what days passed.
One night I resumed my wanderings in the streets for an hour or two,
and then returned home and went to bed,--but not to sleep. For me
there was no more sleep till those ancestral voices could be
quelled--till that sound of Winnie's song in the street could be
stopped in my ears. For very relief from them I again leapt out of
bed, lit a candle, unlocked the cabinet, and taking out the amulet,
proceeded to examine the I facets as I did once before when I heard
in the Swiss cottage these words of my stricken father:--
'Should you ever come to love as I have loved, you will find that
materialism is intolerable--is hell itself--to the heart that has
known a passion like mine. You will find that it is madness, Hal,
madness, to believe in the word "never"! You will find that you
_dare_ not leave untried any creed, howsoever wild, that offers the
heart a ray of hope.'
And then while the candle burnt out dead in the socket I sat in a
waking dream.