I sprang up, struck a light and relit the candle, and soon reached
the coffin resting on a stone table. I found, on examining it, that
although it had been screwed down after the discovery of the
violation, the work had been so loosely done that a few turns of the
screwdriver were sufficient to set the lid free. Then I paused; for
to raise the loosened lid (knowing as I did that it was only the
blood's inherited follies that had conquered my rationalism and
induced me to disturb the tomb) seemed to require the strength of a
giant. Moreover, the fantastic terror of old Lantoff's story, which
at another time would have made me smile, also took bodily shape, and
the picture of a dreadful struggle at the edge of the cliff between
Winnie's father and mine seemed to hang in the air--a fascinating
mirage of ghastly horror.
* * * * *
At last, by an immense effort of will, I closed my eyes and pushed
the lid violently on one side.
* * * * *
The 'sweet odours and divers kinds of spices' of the Jewish embalmer
rose like a gust of incense--rose and spread through the crypt like
the sweet breath of a new-born blessing, till the air of the
charnel-house seemed laden with a mingled odour of indescribable
sweetness. Never had any odour so delighted my senses; never had any
sensuous influence so soothed my soul.
While I stood inhaling the scents of opobalsam, and cinnamon and
myrrh, and wine of palm and oil of cedar, and all the other spices of
the Pharaohs, mingled in one strange aromatic cloud, my personality
seemed again to become, in part, the reflex of ancestral experiences.
I opened my eyes. I looked into the coffin. The face (which had been
left by the embalmer exposed) confronted mine. 'Fenella Stanley!' I
cried, for the great transfigurer Death had written upon my father's
brow that self-same message which the passions of a thousand Romany
ancestors had set upon the face of her whose portrait hung in the
picture-gallery. And the rubies and diamonds and beryls of the cross
as it now hung upon my breast, catching the light of the opened
lantern in my left hand, shed over the features an indescribable
reflex hue of quivering rose.
Beneath his head I placed the silver casket: I hung the hair-chain
round his neck: I laid upon his breast the long-loved memento of his
love and the parchment scroll.
Then I sank down by the coffin, and prayed. I knew not what or why.
But never since the first human prayer was breathed did there rise to
heaven a supplication so incoherent and so wild as mine. Then I rose,
and laying my hand upon my father's cold brow, I said: 'You have
forgiven me for all the wild words that I uttered in my long agony.
They were but the voice of intolerable misery rebelling against
itself. You, who suffered so much--who know so well those flames
burning at the heart's core--those flames before which all the forces
of the man go down like prairie-grass before the fire and wind--you
have forgiven me. You who knew the meaning of the wild word Love--you
have forgiven your suffering son, stricken like yourself. You have
forgiven me, father, and forgiven him, the despoiler of your tomb:
you have removed the curse, and his child--his innocent child--is
free.'
I replaced the coffin-lid, and screwing it down left the crypt, so
buoyant and exhilarated that I stopped in the churchyard and asked
myself: 'Do I, then, really believe that she was under a curse? Do I
really relieve that my restoring the amulet has removed it? Have I
really come to this?'
Throughout all these proceedings--yes, even amidst that prayer to
Heaven, amidst that impassioned appeal to my dead father--had my
reason been keeping up that scoffing at my heart which I have before
described.
I knocked up the landlord of the 'White Hart,' and, turning into bed,
slept my first peaceful sleep since my trouble.
To escape awkward questions, I did not in the morning take back the
keys to Shales's house myself, but sent them, and walking to
Dullingham took the train to London.
X