The bright light of morning was pouring through the window. I gave a
start of horror, and cried, 'Whose face?' Opposite to me there seemed
to be sitting on a bed the figure of a man with a fiery cross upon
his breast. That strange wild light upon the face, as it the pains at
the heart were flickering up through the flesh--where had I seen it?
For a moment when, in Switzerland, my father bared his bosom to me,
that ancestral flame had flashed up into his dull lineaments. But
upon the picture of 'The Sibyl' in the portrait-gallery that
illumination was perpetual!
'It is merely my own reflex in a looking-glass,' I exclaimed.
Without knowing it I had slung the cross round my neck.
And then Sinfi Lovell's voice seemed murmuring in my ears, 'Fenella
Stanley's dead and dust, and that's why she can make you put that
cross in your feyther's tomb, and she will, she will.'
I turned the cross round: the front of it was now next to my skin.
Sharp as needles were those diamond and ruby points as I sat and
gazed in the glass. Slowly a sensation arose on my breast, of pain
that was a pleasure wild and new. _I was feeling the facet_. But the
tears trickling down, salt, through my moustache tears of laughter;
for Sinfi Lovell seemed again murmuring, 'For good or for ill, you
must dig deep to bury your daddy.'
What thoughts and what sensations were mine as I sat there, pressing
the sharp stones into my breast, thinking of her to whom the sacred
symbol had come, not as a blessing, but as a curse--what agonies were
mine as I sat there sobbing the one word 'Winnie,'--could be
understood by myself alone, the latest blossom of the passionate
blood that for generations had brought bliss and bale to the Aylwins.
* * * * *
I cannot tell what I felt and thought, but only what I did. And while
I did it my reason was all the time scoffing at my heart (for whose
imperious behoof the wild, mad things I am about to record were
done)--scoffing, as an Asiatic malefactor will sometimes scoff at the
executioner whose pitiless and conquering saw is severing his
bleeding body in twain. I arose and murmured ironically to Fenella
Stanley as I wrapped the cross in a handkerchief and placed it in a
hand-valise: 'Secrecy is the first thing for us sacrilegists to
consider, dear Sibyl, in placing a valuable jewel in a tomb in a
deserted church. To take any one into our confidence would be
impossible; we must go alone. But to open the tomb and, close it
again, and leave no trace of what has been done, will require all our
skill. And as burglars' jemmies are not on open sale we must buy, on
our way to the railway-station, screw-drivers, chisels, a hammer, and
a lantern; for who should know better than you, dear Sibyl, that the
palace of Nin-ki-gal is dark?'