Aylwin Part 12

The evening wore on, and yet I _would_ not face this phantom fear, though it refused to quit me.

The servants went to bed quite early that night, and when the butler came to ask me if I should 'want anything more,' I said 'only a candle,' and went up to my bedroom.

'I will turn into bed,' I said, 'and sleep over it. The idea is a figment of an over-wrought brain. Destiny would never play any man a trick like that which I have dared to dream of. Among human calamities it would be at once the most shocking and the most whimsical--this imaginary woe that scares me. Destiny is merciless, but who ever heard of Destiny playing mere cruel practical jokes upon man? Up to 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 COMPa.s.sION 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 superst.i.tions, brought me no comfort. I knew that, brave as Winifred was as a child, she was, when confronting the material world, very superst.i.tious. 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 superst.i.tions of the Welsh hills awed her. I knew that it had been her lot to imbibe, not only Celtic, but Romany superst.i.tions. 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 superst.i.tious of all, and that Winifred had become an object of strong affection to the most superst.i.tious 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 superst.i.tion 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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sed.

'It comes from the church or from behind the church,' I said, as the shriek was followed by an angry murmur as of m.u.f.fled thunder. All had occurred within the s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s 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!

VIII

I walked along the cliff to the gangway behind Flinty Point, and descended in order to see what havoc the landslip had made with the graves.

I looked across the same moonlit sands where I had seen Winifred so short a time before, when I had a father. To my delight and surprise, there she was again. There was Winifred, walking thoughtfully towards Church Cove with Snap by her side, who seemed equally thoughtful and sedate. The relief of finding that my fears about her father were groundless added to my joy at seeing her. With my own dead father lying within a few roods of me, I ran towards her in a state of high exhilaration, forgetting everything but her. With sympathetic looks for my bereavement she met me, and we walked hand-in-hand in silence.

After a little while she said: 'My father told me he was very busy to-night, and wished me to come on the sands for a walk, but I little hoped to meet you; I am very pleased we have met, for to-morrow I am going to London.'

'To London?' I said, in dismay at the thought of losing her so soon.

'Why are you going to London. Winnie?'

'Oh,' said she, with the same innocent look of business-like importance which, at our first meeting as children, had so impressed me when she pulled out the key to open the church door, 'I'm going on business.'

'On business! And how long do you stay?'

'I don't stay at all; I'm coming back immediately.'

'Come,' I exclaimed, 'there's a little comfort in that, at least.

Snap and I can wait for one day.'

'Good-night,' said Winifred.

'Have you not seen the great landslip at the churchyard?' I asked, taking her hand and pointing to the new promontory which the _debris_ of the fall had made.

'Another landslip?' said she. 'Poor dear old churchyard, it will soon all be gone! Snap and I must have been far away when that fell. But I remember saying to him, 'Hark at the thunder. Snap!' and then I heard a sound like a shriek that appalled me. It recalled a sound I once heard in Shire-Carnarvon.'

'What was it, Winnie?'

'You've heard me when I was a little girl talk of my Gypsy sister Sinfi?'

'Often,' I said.

'She loves me more than anybody else in the whole world,' said Winifred simply. 'She says she would lay down her life for me, and I really believe she would. Well, there is not far from where I used to live a famous cascade called the Swallow Falls, where the water drops down a chasm of great depth. If you listen to the noise of the cataract, you may hear mingled with it a peculiar kind of wail as from a man in great agony. It is said to be the wail of a Sir John Wynn, of Gwydir, whose spirit is under a curse, and is imprisoned at the bottom of the falls on account of his cruelty and misdeeds on earth. On those rare nights when the full moon shines down the chasm, the wail becomes an agonised shriek. Once on a bright moonlight night Sinfi and I went to see these falls. The moonlight on the cascade had exactly the same supernatural appearance that it has now falling upon these billows. Sinfi sings some of our Welsh songs, and accompanies herself on a peculiar obsolete Welsh instrument called a crwth, which she always carries with her. While we were listening to the cataract and what she called the Wynn wail, she began to sing the wild old air. Then at once the wail sprang into a loud shriek; Sinfi said the shriek of a cursed spirit; and the shriek was exactly like the sound I heard from the cliffs a little while ago.'

'I heard the same noise, Winnie. It was simply the rending and cracking of the poor churchyard trees as they fell.'

She turned back with me to the water-mark to see the waves come tumbling in beneath the moon. We sauntered along the sea-margin again, heedless of the pa.s.sage of time.

And again (as on that betrothal night) Winifred prattled on, while I listened to the prattle, craftily throwing in a word or two, now and then, to direct the course of the sweet music into such channels as best pleased my lordly whim,--when suddenly, against my will and reason, there came into my mind that idea of the sea's prophecy which was so familiar to my childhood, but which my studies had now made me despise.

The sea then threw up to Winifred's feet a piece of seaweed. It was a long band of common weed, that would in the sunlight have shone a bright red. And at that very moment--right across the sparkling bar the moon had laid over the sea--there pa.s.sed, without any cloud to cast it, a shadow. And my father's description of his love-tragedy haunted me, I knew not why. And right across my life, dividing it in twain like a burn-scar, came and lay for ever that strip of red seaweed. Why did my father's description of his own love-tragedy haunt me?

Before recalling the words that had fallen from my father in Switzerland, I was a boy: in a few minutes afterwards, I was a man with an awful knowledge of Destiny in my eyes--a man struggling with calamity, and fainting in the grip of dread. My manhood, I say, dates from the throwing up of that strip of seaweed. Winifred picked up the weed and made a necklace of it, in the old childish way, knowing how much it would please me.

'Isn't it a lovely colour?' she said, as it glistened in the moonlight. 'Isn't it just as beautiful and just as precious as if it were really made of the jewels it seems to rival?'

'It is as red as the reddest ruby,' I replied, putting out my hand and grasping the slippery substance.

'Would you believe,' said Winnie, 'that I never saw a ruby in my life? And now I particularly want to know all about rubies.'

'Why do you want particularly to know?'

'Because,' said Winifred, 'my father, when he wished me to come out for a walk, had been talking a great deal about rubies.'

'Your father had been talking about rubies, Winifred--how very odd!'

'Yes,' said Winifred, 'and he talked about diamonds too.'

'THE CURSE!' I murmured, and clasped her to my breast. 'Kiss me, Winifred!'