Aylwin. Theodore Watts-Dunton
now the Fates have never set up as humorists. Now, for a man to love, to dote upon, a girl whose father is the violator of his own father's tomb—a wretch who has called down upon himself the most terrible curse of a dead man that has ever been uttered—that would be a fate too fantastically cruel to be permitted by Heaven—by any governing power whose sanctions were not those of a whimsical cruelty.'
Yet those words of my mother's about Wynne, and her suspicions of him, were flitting about the air of the room like fiery-eyed bats.
The air of the room—ah! it was stifling me. I opened the window and leant out. But that made matters a thousand times worse, for the moon was now at the very full, and staring across—staring at what?—staring across the sea at the tall tower of the old church on the cliff, where perhaps the sin—the 'unpardonable sin,' according to Cymric ideas—of sacrilege—sacrilege committed by her father upon the grave of mine—might at this moment be going on. The body of the church was hidden from me by the intervening trees, and nothing but the tall tower shone in the silver light. So intently did the moon stare at it, that it seemed to me that the inside of the church, with its silent aisles, arches, and tombs, was reflected on her disc. The moon oppressed me, and when I turned my eyes away I seemed to see hanging in the air the silent aisles of a church, through whose windows the moonlight was pouring, flooding them with a radiance more ghastly than darkness, concentrating all its light on the chancel, beneath which I knew that my father was lying in the dark crypt with a cross on his breast. I turned for relief to look in the room, and there, in the darkness made by the shadow of the bed, I seemed to read, written in pale, trembling flame, the words:
'LET THERE BE NO MAN TO PITY HIM, NOR TO HAVE COMPASSION UPON HIS FATHERLESS CHILDREN. … LET HIS CHILDREN BE VAGABONDS, AND BEG THEIR BREAD: LET THEM SEEK IT ALSO OUT OF DESOLATE PLACES.'
I returned to the window for relief from the bedroom.
'Now, let me calmly consider the case in all its bearings, I said to myself, drawing a chair to the window and sitting down with my elbows resting on the sill. 'Suppose Wynne really did overhear the altercation between my mother and my uncle, which seems scarcely probable, has drink really so demoralised him, so brutalised him, that for drink he would commit the crime of sacrilege? There are no signs of his having sunk so low as that. But suppose the crime were committed, what then? Do I really believe that the curse of my father and of the Psalmist would fall upon Winifred's pure and innocent head? Certainly not. I do not believe in the effect of curses at all. I do not belief in any supernatural interference with the natural laws of the universe.'
Ah! but this thought about the futility of the curse, about the folly of my father's superstitions, brought me no comfort. I knew that, brave as Winifred was as a child, she was, when confronting the material world, very superstitious. I remembered that as a child, whenever I said, 'What a happy day it has been!' she would not rest until she had made me add, 'and shall have many more,' because of her feeling of the prophetic power of words. I knew that the superstitions of the Welsh hills awed her. I knew that it had been her lot to imbibe, not only Celtic, but Romany superstitions. I knew that the tribe of Gypsies with whom she had been thrown into contact, the Lovells and the Boswells, though superior to the rest, of the Romany race, are the most superstitious of all, and that Winifred had become an object of strong affection to the most superstitious even among that tribe, one Sinfi Lovell. I knew from something that had once fallen from her as a child on the sands, when prattling about Sinfi Lovell and Rhona Boswell, that especially powerful with her was the idea (both Romany and Celtic) about the effect of a dead man's curse. I knew that this idea had a dreadful fascination for her—the fascination of repulsion. I knew also that reason may strive with superstition as with the other instincts, but it will strive in vain. I knew that it would have been worse than idle for me to say to Winifred, 'There is no curse in the matter. The dreaming mystic who begot and forgot me, what curse could he call down on a soul like my Winifred's?' Her reason might partly accept my arguments; but straightway they would be spurned by her instincts and her traditional habits of thought. The terrible voice of the Psalmist would hush every other sound. Her sweet soul would pine under the blazing fire of a curse, real or imaginary; her life would be henceforth but a bitter penance. Like the girl in Coleridge's poem of 'The Three Graves,' her very flesh would waste before the fires of her imagination. 'No,' said I, 'such a calamity as this which I dread Heaven would not permit. So cruel a joke as this Hell itself would not have the heart to play.'
My meditations were interrupted by a sound, and then by a sensation such as I cannot describe. Whence came that shriek? It was like a coming from a distance—loud there, faint here, and yet it seemed to come from me! It was as though I were witnessing some dreadful sight unutterable and intolerable. And then it seemed the voice of Winifred, and then it seemed her father's voice, and finally it seemed the voice of my own father struggling in his tomb. My horror stopped the pulses of my heart for a moment, and then it passed.
'It comes from the church or from behind the church,' I said, as the shriek was followed by an angry murmur as of muffled thunder. All had occurred within the space of half a second. I quickly but cautiously opened my bedroom door, extinguishing my light before doing so, and began to creep downstairs, fearing to wake my mother. My shoes creaked, so I took them off and carried them. Crossing the hall, I softly drew the bolts of the front door; then I passed into the moonlight. The gravel of the carriage-drive cut through my stockings, and a pebble bruised one of my heels so that I nearly fell. When I got safely under the shadow of the large cedar of Lebanon in the middle of the lawn, I stopped and looked up at my mother's window to see if she were a watcher. The blinds were down, there was no movement, no noise. Evidently she was asleep. I put on my shoes and hurried across the lawn towards the high road. I walked at a sharp pace towards the old church. The bark of a distant dog or the baa of a waking sheep was the only sound. When I reached the churchyard, I peered in dread over the lich-gate before I opened it. Neither Wynne nor any living creature was to be seen in the churchyard.
The soothing smell of the sea came from the cliffs, making me wonder at my fears. On the loneliest coast, in the dunnest night, a sense of companionship comes with the smell of seaweed. At my feet spread the great churchyard, with its hundreds of little green hillocks and white gravestones, sprinkled here and there with square, box-like tombs. All quietly asleep in the moonlight! Here and there an aged headstone seemed to nod to its neighbour, as though muttering in its dreams. The old church, bathed in the radiance, seemed larger than it had ever done in daylight, and incomparably more grand and lonely.
On the left were the tall poplar trees, rustling and whispering among themselves. Still, there might be at the back of the church mischief working. I walked round thither. The ghostly shadows on the long grass might have been shadows thrown by the ruins of Tadmor, so quietly did they lie and dream. A weight was uplifted from my soul. A balm of sweet peace fell upon my heart. The noises I had heard had been imaginary, conjured up by love and fear; or they might have been an echo of distant thunder. The windows of the church no doubt looked ghastly, as I peered in to see whether Wynne's lantern was moving about. But all was still. I lingered in the churchyard close by the spot where I had first seen the child Winifred and heard the Welsh song.
I went to look at the sea from the cliff. Here, however, there was something sensational at last. The spot where years ago I had sat when Winifred's song had struck upon my ear and awoke me to a new life—was gone! 'This then was the noise I heard,' I said; 'the rumbling was the falling of the earth; the shriek was the tearing down of trees.'
Another slice, a slice weighing thousands of tons, had slipped since the afternoon from the churchyard on to the sands below. 'Perhaps the tread of the townspeople who came to witness the funeral may have given the last shake to the soil,' I said.
I stood and looked over the newly-made gap at the great hungry water. Considering the little wind, the swell on the North Sea was tremendous. Far away there had been a storm somewhere. The moon was laying a band of living light across the vast bosom of the sea, like a girdle. Only a month had elapsed since that never-to-be-forgotten moonlight walk with Winifred. But what a world of emotion since then!
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