As I hurried towards the Great Eastern Railway station, I felt like a
horse drawn by a Gypsy whisperer to do something against his own
will, and yet in the street I stopped to buy the tools. Reaching
Dullingham in the afternoon, I lunched there; and as I walked thence
along the cliff, towards Raxton, I became more calm and collected. I
determined not to go near the Hall, lest my movements should be
watched by the servants. The old churchyard was full of workmen of
the navvy kind, and I learned that for the safety of the public it
had now become necessary to hurl down upon the sands some enormous
masses of the cliff newly disintegrated by the land-springs. I
descended the gangway at Flinty Point, and concealing my implements
behind a boulder in the cliff, ascended Needle Point, and went into
the town.
I had previously become aware, from conversations with my mother,
that Wynne had been succeeded as custodian of the old church by
Shales, the humpbacked tailor, and I apprehended no difficulty in
getting the keys of the church and crypt from my simple-minded
acquaintance, without arousing his suspicions as to my mission.
Therefore I went at once to the tailor's shop, but found that Shales
was out, attending an annual Odd-Fellows' carousal at Graylingham.
Consequently I was obliged to open my business to his mother, a far
shrewder person, and one who might be much more difficult to deal
with. However, the fact of the navvies being at work so close to a
church whose chancel belonged to my family afforded an excellent
motive for my visit. But before I could introduce the subject to Mrs.
Shales, I had to listen to an exhaustive chronicle of Raxton and
Graylingham doings since I had left. Hence by the time I quitted her
(with a promise to return the keys in the morning) the sun was
setting.
But, as I walked along Wilderness Road towards the church, a new and
unexpected difficulty presented itself to my mind. I could not,
without running the risk of an interruption, enter the church till
after the Odd-Fellows had all returned from Graylingham, as Shales
and his companions would have to pass along Wilderness Road, which
skirts the churchyard. Shales himself was as short-sighted as a bat;
but his companions had the usual long-sight of agriculturists, and
would descry the slightest movement in the church-yard, or any
glimmer of light at the church windows.
I would have postponed my enterprise till the morrow; but another
important appointment at the office of our solicitor with my mother,
precluded the possibility of this. So my visit to the catacomb must
perforce be late at night.
Accordingly I descended the cliff and waited to hear the return of
the carousers. There I sat down upon the well-remembered boulder,
lost in recollections of all that had passed on those sands, while
over the sea the night spread like the widening, darkening wings of
an enormous spectral bird, whose brooding voice was the drone of the
waves as they came nearer and nearer. Then I began to think of what
lay before me, of the strangeness and wildness of my life.
Then I recalled, with a shudder I could not repress, those sepulchral
chambers beneath the church, which, owing, I believe, to the
directions in an ancestor's will, had been the means of saving it
from demolition after a large portion of the churchyard bad been
condemned as dangerous. Raxton church is the only one along the coast
that can boast a crypt: all the churches are Perpendicular in style,
too late for crypts; a fact which is supposed to indicate that Raxton
was, in very early times, a seaside town of great importance; for the
crypt is much older than the church, and of an entirely different
kind of architecture. It was once a depository for the bones of
Danish warriors killed before the Norman Conquest; it extends not
only beneath the chancel, as in most cases, but beneath both the
transepts. The vaulting (supported partly on low columns of
remarkable beauty and partly on the basement wall of the church) is
therefore of unusual extent. The external door in the churchyard is
now hidden by drifted sand and mould. Many years ago, to give place
to the tombs and coffins of my family, the bones of the old Danes
were piled together in various corners; and the thought of these
bones called up the picture of the abode of 'Nin-ki-gal,' the Queen
of Death,
Ghosts, like birds, flutter their wings there;
On the gate and the gate-posts the dust lies undisturbed.
Then my mind began to make pictures for itself of my father lying in
his coffin. I have, I think, already said that his body had been
embalmed, in order to allow of its being conveyed from Switzerland to
England. Therefore I had no dread of being confronted by that
attribute of Death alluded to by D'Arcy which is the most cruel and
terrible of all--corruption. But then what change should I find in
the _expression_ of those features which on the day of the interment
had looked so calm? A thrill ran through my frame as I pictured
myself raising the coffin-lid, and finding expressed upon the face,
in language more appalling than any malediction in articulate
speech--the curse!
At about ten o'clock I mounted the gangway and waited behind a
deserted bungalow built for Fenella Stanley till I should hear the
Odd-Fellows returning. In a few minutes I heard them approaching.
They were singing snatches of songs they had been entertained with at
Graylingham, and chatting and laughing as they went down Wilderness
Road towards Raxton. As they passed the bungalow and adjoining mill
there was a silence.