Aylwin

by Theodore Watts-Dunton

AYLWIN

THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER

I

THE CYMRIC CHILD

I

'Those who in childhood have had solitary communings with the sea know the sea's prophecy. They know that there is a deeper sympathy between the sea and the soul of man than other people dream of. They know that the water seems nearer akin than the land to the spiritual world, inasmuch as it is one and indivisible, and has motion, and answers to the mysterious call of the winds, and is the writing tablet of the moon and stars. When a child who, born beside the sea, and beloved by the sea, feels suddenly, as he gazes upon it, a dim sense of pity and warning; when there comes, or seems to come, a shadow across the waves, with never a cloud in the sky to cast it; when there comes a shuddering as of wings that move in dread or ire, then such a child feels as if the bloodhounds of calamity are let loose upon him or upon those he loves; he feels that the sea has told him all it dares tell or can. And, in other moods of fate, when beneath a cloudy sky the myriad dimples of the sea begin to sparkle as though the sun were shining bright upon them, such a child feels, as he gazes at it, that the sea is telling him of some great joy near at hand, or, at least, not far off.'

One lovely summer afternoon a little boy was sitting on the edge of the cliff that skirts the old churchyard of Raxton-on-Sea. He was sitting on the grass close to the brink of the indentation cut by the water into the horse-shoe curve called by the fishermen Mousetrap Cove; sitting there as still as an image of a boy in stone, at the forbidden spot where the wooden fence proclaimed the crumbling hollow crust to be specially dangerous—sitting and looking across the sheer deep gulf below.

Flinty Point on his right was sometimes in purple shadow and sometimes shining in the sun; Needle Point on his left was sometimes in purple shadow and sometimes shining in the sun; and beyond these headlands spread now the wide purple, and now the wide sparkle of the open sea. The very gulls, wheeling as close to him as they dared, seemed to be frightened at the little boy's peril. Straight ahead he was gazing, however—gazing so intently that his eyes must have been seeing very much or else very little of that limitless world of light and coloured shade. On account of certain questions connected with race that will be raised in this narrative, I must dwell a little while upon the child's personal appearance, and especially upon his colour. Natural or acquired, it was one that might be almost called unique; as much like a young Gypsy's colour as was compatible with respectable descent, and yet not a Gypsy's colour. A deep undertone of 'Romany brown' seemed breaking through that peculiar kind of ruddy golden glow which no sunshine can give till it has itself been deepened and coloured and enriched by the responsive kisses of the sea.

Moreover, there was a certain something in his eyes that was not Gypsy-like—a something which is not uncommonly seen in the eyes of boys born along that coast, whether those eyes be black or blue or grey; a something which cannot be described, but which seems like a reflex of the daring gaze of that great land-conquering and daring sea. Very striking was this expression as he momentarily turned his face landward to watch one of the gulls that had come wheeling up the cliffs towards the flinty grey tower of the church—the old deserted church, whose graveyard the sea had already half washed away. As his eyes followed the bird's movements, however, this daring sea-look seemed to be growing gradually weaker and weaker. At last it faded away altogether, and by the time his face was turned again towards the sea, the look I have tried to describe was supplanted by such a gaze as that gull would give were it hiding behind a boulder with a broken wing. A mist of cruel trouble was covering his eyes, and soon the mist had grown into two bright glittering pearly tears, which, globing and trembling, larger and larger, were at length big enough to drown both eyes; big enough to drop, shining, on the grass: big enough to blot out altogether the most brilliant picture that sea and sky could make. For that little boy had begun to learn a lesson which life was going to teach him fully—the lesson that shining sails in the sunny wind, and black trailing bands of smoke passing here and there along the horizon, and silvery gulls dipping playfully into the green and silver waves (nay, all the beauties and all the wonders of the world), make but a blurred picture to eyes that look through the lens of tears. However, with a brown hand brisk and angry, he brushed away these tears, like one who should say, 'This kind of thing will never do.'

Indeed, so hardy was the boy's face—tanned by the sun, hardened and bronzed by the wind, reddened by the brine—that tears seemed entirely out of place there. The meaning of those tears must be fully accounted for, and if possible fully justified, for this little boy is to be the hero of this story. In other words, he is Henry Aylwin; that is to say, myself: and those who know me now in the full vigour of manhood, a lusty knight of the alpenstock of some repute, will be surprised to know what troubled me. They will be surprised to know that owing to a fall from the cliff I was for about two years a cripple.

This is how it came about. Rough and yielding as were the paths, called 'gangways,' connecting the cliffs with the endless reaches of sand below, they were not rough enough, or yielding enough, or in any way dangerous enough for me.

So I used to fashion 'gangways' of my own; I used to descend the cliff at whatsoever point it pleased me, clinging to the lumps of sandy earth with the prehensile power of a spider-monkey. Many a warning had I had from the good fishermen and sea-folk, that some day I should fall from top to bottom—fall and break my neck. A laugh was my sole answer to these warnings; for, with the possession of perfect health, I had inherited that instinctive belief in good luck which perfect health will often engender.

However, my punishment came at last. The coast, which is yielding gradually to the sea, is famous for sudden and gigantic landslips. These landslips are sometimes followed, at the return of the tide, by a further fall, called a 'settlement.' The word 'settlement' explains itself, perhaps. No matter how smooth the sea, the return of the tide seems on that coast to have a strange magnetic power upon the land, and the debris of a landslip will sometimes, though not always, respond to it by again falling and settling into new and permanent shapes.

Now, on the morning after a great landslip, when the coastguard, returning on his beat, found a cove where, half-an-hour before, he had left his own cabbages growing, I, in spite of all warnings, had climbed the heap of débris from the sands, and while I was hallooing triumphantly to two companions below—the two most impudent-looking urchins, bare-footed and unkempt, that ever a gentleman's son forgathered with—a great mass of loose earth settled, carrying me with it in its fall. I was taken up for dead.

It was, however, only a matter of broken ribs and a damaged leg. And there is no doubt that if the local surgeon had not been allowed to have his own way, I should soon have been cured. As it was I became a cripple. The great central fact—the very pivot upon which all the wheels of my life have since been turning—is that for two years during the impressionable period of childhood I walked with crutches.

It must not be supposed that my tears—the tears which at this moment were blotting out the light and glory of the North Sea in the sun—came from the pain I was suffering. They came from certain terrible news, which even my brother Frank had been careful to keep from me, but which had fallen from the lips of my father—the news that I was not unlikely to be a cripple for life. From that moment I had become a changed being, solitary and sometimes morose. I would come and sit staring at the ocean, meditating on tilings in general, but chiefly on things connected with cripples, asking myself, as now, whether life would be bearable on crutches.

At my heart were misery and anger and such revolt as is, I hope, rarely found in the heart of a child. I had sat down outside the rails at this most dangerous point along the cliff, wondering whether or not it would crumble beneath me. For this lameness coming to me, who had been so active, who had been, indeed, the little athlete and pugilist of the sands, seemed to have isolated me from my fellow-creatures to a degree that is inconceivable to me now. A stubborn will and masterful pride made me refuse to accept a disaster such as many a nobler soul than mine has, I am conscious, borne with patience. My nature became soured by asking in vain for sympathy at home; my loneliness drove me—silent, haughty, and aggressive—to haunt the churchyard, and sit at the edge of the cliff, gazing wistfully at the sea and the sands which could not be reached on crutches. Like a wounded sea-gull, I retired and took my trouble alone.

How could I help taking it alone when none would sympathise with me? My brother Frank called me 'The Black Savage,' and I half began to suspect myself of secret impulses of a savage kind. Once I heard my mother murmur, as she stroked Frank's rosy cheeks and golden curls, 'My poor Henry is a strange, proud boy!' Then, looking from my crutches to Frank's beautiful limbs, she said, 'How providential that it was not the elder! Providence is kind.' She meant kind to the House of Aylwin. I often wonder whether she guessed that I heard her. I often wonder whether she knew how I had loved her.

This is how matters stood with me on that summer afternoon, when I sat on the edge of the cliff in a kind of dull, miserable dream. Suddenly, at the moment when the huge mass of clouds had covered the entire surface of the water between Flinty Point and Needle Point with their rich purple shadow, it seemed to me that the waves began to sparkle and laugh in a joyful radiance which they were making for themselves. And at that same moment an unwonted sound struck my ear from the churchyard behind me—a strange sound indeed in that deserted place—that of a childish voice singing.

Was, then, the mighty ocean writing symbols for an unhappy child to read? My father, from whose book, The Veiled Queen, the extract with which this chapter opens is taken, would, unhesitatingly, have answered 'Yes.'

'Destiny, no doubt, in the Greek drama concerns itself only with the great,' says he, in that wonderful book of his. 'But who are the great? With the unseen powers, mysterious and imperious, who govern while they seem not to govern all that is seen, who are the great? In a world where man's loftiest ambitions are to higher intelligences childish dreams, where his highest knowledge is ignorance, where his strongest strength is to heaven a derision—who are the great? Are they not the few men and women and children on the earth who greatly love?'

II

So sweet a sound as that childish voice I had never heard before.
I held my breath and listened.

Into my very being that child-voice passed, and it was a new music and a new joy. I can give the reader no notion of it, because there is not in nature anything with which I can compare it. The blackcap has a climacteric note, just before his song collapses and dies, so full of pathos and tenderness that often, when I had been sitting on a gate in Wilderness Road, it had affected me more deeply than any human words. But here was a note sweet and soft as that, and yet charged with a richness no blackcap's song had ever borne, because no blackcap has ever felt the joys and sorrows of a young human soul.

The voice was singing in a language which seemed strange to me then, but has been familiar enough since:

Bore o'r cymwl aur,
Eryri oedd dy gaer.
Bren o wyllt a gwar,
Gwawr ysbrydau.[Footnote]

[Footnote: Morning of the golden cloud,
Eryrl was thy castle,
King of the wild and tame,
Glory of the spirits of air!]

[Eryri—the Place of Eagles, i.e. Snowdon.]

Intense curiosity now made me suddenly forget my troubles. I scrambled back through the trees not tar from that spot and looked around. There, sitting upon a grassy grave, beneath one of the windows of the church, was a little girl, somewhat younger than myself apparently. With her head bent back she was gazing up at the sky and singing, while one of her little hands was pointing to a tiny cloud that hovered like a golden feather over her head. The sun, which had suddenly become very bright, shining on her glossy hair (for she was bare-headed) gave it a metallic lustre, and it was difficult to say what was the colour, dark bronze or black. So completely absorbed was she in watching the cloud to which her strange song or incantation seemed addressed, that she did not observe me when I rose and went towards her. Over her head, high up in the blue, a lark that was soaring towards the same gauzy cloud was singing, as if in rivalry. As I slowly approached the child, I could see by her forehead (which in the sunshine gleamed like a globe of pearl), and especially by her complexion, that she was uncommonly lovely, and I was afraid lest she should look down before I got close to her, and so see my crutches before her eyes encountered my face. She did not, however, seem to hear me coming along the grass (so intent was she with her singing) until I was close to her, and throwing my shadow over her. Then she suddenly lowered her head and looked at me in surprise. I stood transfixed at her astonishing beauty. No other picture has ever taken such possession of me. In its every detail it lives before me now. Her eyes (which at one moment seemed blue grey, at another violet) were shaded by long black lashes, curving backward in a most peculiar way, and these matched in hue her eyebrows, and the tresses that were tossed about her tender throat and were quivering in the sunlight.

All this picture I did not take in at once; for at first I could see nothing but those quivering, glittering, changeful eyes turned up into my face. Gradually the other features (especially the sensitive full-lipped mouth) grew upon me as I stood silently gazing. Here seemed to me a more perfect beauty than had ever come to me in my loveliest dreams of beauty beneath the sea. Yet it was not her beauty perhaps, so much as the look she gave me, that fascinated me, melted me.

As she gazed in my face there came over hers a look of pleased surprise, and then, as her eyes passed rapidly down my limbs and up again, her face was not overshadowed with the look of disappointment which I had waited for—yes, waited for, like a pinioned criminal for the executioner's uplifted knife; but the smile of pleasure was still playing about the little mouth, while the tender young eyes were moistening rapidly with the dews of a kind of pity that was new to me, a pity that did not blister the pride of the lonely wounded sea-gull, but soothed, healed, and blessed.

Remember that I was a younger son—that I was swarthy—that I was a cripple—and that my mother—had Frank. It was as though my heart must leap from my breast towards that child. Not a word had she spoken, but she had said what the little maimed 'fighting Hal' yearned to hear, and without knowing that he yearned.

I restrained myself, and did not yield to the feeling that impelled me to throw my arms round her neck in an ecstasy of wonder and delight. After a second or two she again threw back her head to gaze at the golden cloud.

'Look!' said she, suddenly clapping her hands, 'it's over both of us now.'

'What is it?' I said.

'The Dukkeripen,' she said, 'the Golden Hand. Sinfi and Rhona both say the Golden Hand brings luck: what is luck?'

I looked up at the little cloud which to me seemed more like a golden feather than a golden hand. But I soon bent my eyes down again to look at her.

While I stood looking at her, the tall figure of a man came out of the church. This was Tom Wynne. Besides being the organist of Raxton 'New Church,' Tom was also (for a few extra shillings a week) custodian of the 'Old Church,' this deserted pile within whose precincts we now were. Tom's features wore an expression of virtuous indignation which puzzled me, and evidently frightened the little girl. He locked the door, and walked unsteadily towards us. He seemed surprised to see me there, and his features relaxed into a bland civility.

'This is (hiccup) Master Aylwin, Winifred,' he said.

The child looked at me again with the same smile. Her alarm had fled.

'This is my little daughter Winifred,' said Tom, with a pompous bow.

I was astonished. I never knew that Wynne had a daughter, for intimate as he and I had become, he had actually never mentioned his daughter before.

'My only daughter,' Tom repeated.

He then told me, with many hiccups, that, since her mother's death (that is to say from her very infancy), Winifred had been brought up by an aunt in Wales. 'Quite a lady, her aunt is,' said Tom proudly, 'and Winifred has come to spend a few weeks with her father.'

He said this in a grandly paternal tone—a tone that seemed meant to impress upon her how very much obliged she ought to feel to him for consenting to be her father; and, judging from the look the child gave him, she did feel very much obliged.

Suddenly, however, a thought seemed to come back upon Tom, a thought which my unexpected appearance on the scene had driven from his drunken brain. The look of virtuous indignation returned, and staring at the little girl through glazed eyes, he said with the tremulous and tearful voice of a deeply injured parent,

'Winifred, I thought I heard you singing one of them heathen Gypsy songs that you learnt of the Gypsies in Wales.'

'No, father,' said she, 'it was the song they sing in Shire-Carnarvon about the golden cloud over Snowdon and the spirits of the air.'

'Yes,' said Tom, 'but a little time ago you were singing a Gypsy song—a downright heathen Gypsy song. I heard it about half an hour ago when I was in the church.'

The beautiful little head drooped in shame.

'I'm s'prised at you, Winifred. When I come to think whose daughter you are.—mine!—I'm s'prised at you,' continued Torn, whose virtuous indignation waxed with every word.

'Oh. I'm so sorry!' said the child. 'I won't do it any more.'

This contrition of the child's only fanned the flame of Tom's virtuous indignation.

'Here am I,' said he, 'the most (hiccup) respectable man in two parishes,—except Master Aylwin's father, of course,—here am I, the organ-player for the Christianest of all the Christian churches along the coast, and here's my daughter sings heathen songs just like a Gypsy or a tinker. I'm s'prised at you, Winifred.'

I had often seen Tom in a dignified state of liquor, but the pathetic expression of injured virtue that again overspread his face so changed it, that I had some difficulty myself in realising how entirely the tears filling his eyes and the grief at his heart were of alcoholic origin. And as to the little girl, she began to sob piteously.

'Oh dear, oh dear, what a wicked girl I am !' said she.

This exclamation, however, aroused my ire against Tom; and as I always looked upon him as my special paid henchman, who, in return for such services as supplying me with tiny boxing-gloves, and fishing-tackle, and bait, during my hale days, and tame rabbits now that I was a cripple, mostly contrived to possess himself of my pocket-money, I had no hesitation in exclaiming,

'Why, Tom, you know you're drunk, you silly old fool!'

At this Tom turned his mournful and reproachful gaze upon me, and began to weep anew. Then he turned and addressed the sea, uplifting his hand in oratorical fashion:—

'Here's a young gentleman as I've been more than a father to—yes, more than a father to—for when did his own father ever give him a ferret-eyed rabbit, a real ferret-eyed rabbit thoroughbred?'

'Why, I gave you one of my five-shilling pieces for it,' said I; 'and the rabbit was in a consumption and died in three weeks.'

But Tom still addressed the sea.

'When did his own father give him,' said he, 'the longest thigh-bone that the sea ever washed out of Raxton churchyard?'

'Why, I gave you two of my five-shilling pieces for that,' said I, 'and next day you went and borrowed the bone, and sold it over again to Dr. Munro for a quart of beer.'

'When did his own father give him a beautiful skull for a money-box, and make an oak lid to it, and keep it for him because his mother wouldn't have it in the house?'

'Ah, but where's the money that was in it, Tom? Where's the money?' said I, flourishing one of my crutches, for I was worked up to a state of high excitement when I recalled my own wrongs and Tom's frauds, and I forgot his relationship to the little girl. 'Where are the bright new half-crowns that were in the money-box when I left it with you—the half-crowns that got changed into pennies, Tom? Where are they? What's the use of having a skull for a money-box if it's got no money in it? That's what I want to know, Tom!'

'Here's a young gentleman,' said Tom, 'as I've done all these things for, and how does he treat me? He says, "Why, Tom, you know you're drunk, you silly old fool."'

At this pathetic appeal the little girl sprang up and turned towards me with the ferocity of a young tigress. Her little hands were tightly clenched, and her eyes seemed positively to be emitting blue sparks. Many a bold boy had I encountered on the sands before my accident, and many a fearless girl, but such an impetuous antagonist as this was new. I leaned on my crutches, however, and looked at her unblenchingly.

'You wicked English boy, to make my father cry,' said she, as soon as her anger allowed her to speak. 'If you were not lame I'd—I'd—I'd hit you.'

I did not move a muscle, but stood lost in a dream of wonder at her amazing loveliness. The fiery flush upon her face and neck, the bewitching childish frown of anger corrugating the brow, the dazzling glitter of the teeth, the quiver of the full scarlet lips above and below them, turned me dizzy with admiration.

Her eyes met mine, and slowly the violet flames in them began to soften. Then they died away entirely as she murmured,

'You wicked English boy, if you hadn't—beautiful—beautiful eyes,
I'd kill you.'

By this time, however, Tom had entirely forgotten his grievance against me, and gazed upon Winifred in a state of drunken wonderment.

'Winifred,' he said, in a tone of sorrowful reproach, 'how dare you speak like that to Master Aylwin, your father's best friend, the only friend your poor father's got in the world, the friend as I give ferret-eyed rabbits to, and tame hares, and beautiful skulls? Beg his pardon this instant, Winifred. Down on your knees and beg my friend's pardon this instant, Winifred.'

The poor little girl stood dazed, and was actually sinking down on her knees on the grass before me.

I cried out in acute distress,

'No, no, no, no, Tom, pray don't let her—dear little girl! beautiful little girl!'

'Very well, Master Aylwin,' said Tom grandly, 'she sha'n't if you don't like, but she shall go and kiss you and make it up.'

At this the child's face brightened, and she came and laid her little red lips upon mine. Velvet lips, I feel them now, soft and warm—I feel them while I write these lines.

Tom looked on for a moment, and then left us, blundering away towards
Raxton, most likely to a beer-house.

He told the child that she was to go home and mind the house until he returned. He gave her the church key to take home. We two were left alone in the churchyard, looking at each other in silence, each waiting for the other to speak. At last she said, demurely, 'Good-bye; father says I must go home.'

And she walked away with a business-like air towards the little white gate of the churchyard, opening upon what was called 'The Wilderness Road.' When she reached the gate she threw a look over her shoulder as she passed through. It was that same look again—wistful, frank, courageous. I immediately began to follow her, although I did not know why. When she saw this she stopped for me. I got up to her, and then we proceeded side by side in perfect silence along the dusty narrow road, perfumed with the scent of wild rose and honeysuckle. Suddenly she stopped and said,

'I have left my hat on the tower,' and laughed merrily at her own heedlessness.

She ran back with an agility which I thought I had never seen equalled. It made me sad to see her run so fast, though once how it would have delighted me! I stood still; but when she reached the church porch she again looked over her shoulder, and again I followed her:—I did not in the least know why. That look I think would have made me follow her through lire and water—it has made me follow her through fire and water. When I reached her she put the great black key in the lock. She had some difficulty in turning the key, but I did not presume to offer such services as mine to so superior a little woman. After one or two fruitless efforts with both her hands, each attempt accompanied with a little laugh and a little merry glance in my face, she turned the key and pushed open the door. We both passed into the ghastly old church, through the green glass windows of which the sun was shining, and illuminating the broken remains of the high-hacked pews on the opposite side. She ran along towards the belfry, and I soon lost her, for she passed up the stone steps, where I knew I could not follow her.

In deep mortification I stood listening at the bottom of the steps—listening to those little feet crunching up the broken stones—listening to the rustle of her dress against the narrow stone walls, until the sounds grew fainter and fainter, and then ceased.

Presently I heard her voice a long way up, calling out, 'Little boy, if you go outside you will see something.' I guessed at once that she was going to exhibit herself on the tower, where, before my accident, I and my brother Frank were so fond of going. I went outside the church and stood in the graveyard, looking up at the tower. In a minute I saw her on it. Her face was turned towards me, gilded by the golden sunshine. I could, or thought I could, even at that distance, see the flash of the bright eyes looking at me. Then a little hand was put over the parapet, and I saw a dark hat swinging by its strings, as she was waving it to me. Oh! that I could have climbed those steps and done that! But that exploit of hers touched a strange chord within me. Had she been a boy, I could have borne it in a defiant way; or had she been any other girl than this, my heart would not have sunk as it now did when I thought of the gulf between her and me. Down I sat upon a grave, and looked at her with a feeling quite new to me.

This was a phase of cripplehood I had not contemplated. She soon left the tower, and made her appearance at the church door again. After locking it, which she did by thrusting a piece of stick through the handle of the key, she came and stood over me. But I turned my eyes away and gazed across the sea, and tried to deceive myself into believing that the waves, and the gulls, and the sails dreaming on the sky-line, and the curling clouds of smoke that came now and then from a steamer passing Dullingham Point were interesting me deeply. There was a remoteness about the little girl now, since I had seen her unusual agility, and I was trying to harden my heart against her. Loneliness I felt was best for me. She did not speak, but stood looking at me. I turned my eyes round and saw that she was looking at my crutches, which were lying beside me aslant the green hillock where I sat. Her face had turned grave and pitiful.

'Oh! I forgot,' she said. 'I wish I had not run away from you now.'

'You may run where you like for what I care,' I said. But the words were very shaky, and I had no sooner said them than I wished them back. She made no reply for some time, and I sat plucking the wild-flowers near my hands, and gazing again across the sea. At last she said,

'Would you like to come in our garden? It's such a nice garden.'

I could resist her no longer. That voice would have drawn me had she spoken in the language of the Toltecs or the lost Zamzummin. To describe it would of course be impossible. The novelty of her accent, the way in which she gave the 'h' in 'which,' 'what,' and 'when,' the Welsh rhythm of her intonation, were as bewitching to me as the timbre of her voice. And let me say here, once for all, that when I sat down to write this narrative, I determined to give the English reader some idea of the way in which, whenever her emotions were deeply touched, her talk would run into soft Welsh diminutives; but I soon abandoned the attempt in despair. I found that to use colloquial Welsh with effect in an English context is impossible without wearying English readers and disappointing Welsh ones.

Here, indeed, is one of the great disadvantages under which this book will go out to the world. While a story-teller may reproduce, by means of orthographical devices, something of the effect of Scottish accent, Irish accent, or Manx accent, such devices are powerless to represent Welsh accent.

I got up in silence, and walked by her side out of the churchyard towards her father's cottage, which was situated between the new church and the old, and at a considerable distance from the town of Raxton on one side, and the village of Graylingham on the other. Her eager young limbs would every moment take her ahead of me, for she was as vigorous as a fawn. But by the time she was half a yard in advance, she would recollect herself and fall back; and every time she did so that same look of tenderness would overspread her face.

At last she said, 'What makes you stare at me so, little boy?'

I blushed and turned my head another way, for I had been feasting my eyes upon her complexion, and trying to satisfy myself as to what it really was like. Indeed, I thought it quite peculiar then, when I had seen so few lovely faces, as I always did afterwards, when I had seen as many as most people. It was, I thought, as though underneath the sunburn the delicate pink tint of the hedge-rose had become mingled with the bloom of a ripening peach, and yet it was like neither peach nor rose. But this tone, whatever it was, did not spread higher than the eyebrows. The forehead was different. It had a singular kind of pearly look, and her long slender throat was almost of the same tone: no, not the same, for there was a transparency about her throat unlike that of the forehead. This colour I was just now thinking looked something like the inside of a certain mysterious shell upon my father's library shelf.

As she asked me her question she stopped, and looked straight at me, opening her eyes wide and round upon me. This threw a look of innocent trustfulness over her bright features which I soon learnt was the chief characteristic of her expression and was altogether peculiar to herself. I knew it was very rude to stare at people as I had been staring at her, and I took her question as a rebuke, although I still was unable to keep my eyes off her. But it was not merely her beauty and her tenderness that had absorbed my attention. I had been noticing how intensely she seemed to enjoy the delights of that summer afternoon. As we passed along that road, where sea-scents and land-scents were mingled, she would stop whenever the sunshine fell full upon her face; her eyes would sparkle and widen with pleasure, and a half-smile would play about her lips, as if some one had kissed her. Every now and then she would stop to listen to the birds, putting up her finger, and with a look of childish wisdom say, 'Do you know what that is? That's a blackbird—that's a thrush—that's a goldfinch. Which eggs do you like best—a goldfinch's or a bullfinch's? I know which I like best.'

III

While we were walking along the road a sound fell upon my ears which in my hale days never produced any very unpleasant sensations, but which did now. I mean the cackling of the field people of both sexes returning from their day's work. These people knew me well, and they liked me, and I am sure they had no idea that when they ran past me on the road their looks and nods gave me no pleasure, but pain; and I always tried to avoid them. As they passed us they somewhat modified the noise they were making, but only to cackle, chatter, and bawl and laugh at each other the louder after we were left behind.

'Don't you wish,' said the little girl meditatively, 'that men and women had voices more like the birds?' The idea had never occurred to me before, but I understood in a moment what she meant, and sympathised with her. Nature of course has been unkind to the lords and ladies of creation in this one matter of voice.

'Yes, I do.' I said.

'I'm so glad you do,' said she. 'I've so often thought what a pity it is that God did not let men and women talk and sing as the birds do. I believe He did let 'em talk like that in the Garden of Eden, don't you?'

'I think it very likely,' I said.

'Men's voices are so rough mostly and women's voices are so sharp mostly, that it's sometimes a little hard to love 'em as you love the birds.'

'It is,' I said.

'Don't you think the poor birds must sometimes feel very much distressed at hearing the voices of men and women, especially when they all talk together?'

The idea seemed so original and yet so true that it made me laugh; we both laughed. At that moment there came a still louder, noisier clamour of voices from the villagers.

'The rooks mayn't mind.' said the little girl, pointing upwards to the large rookery close by. whence came a noise marvellously like that made by the field-workers. 'But I'm afraid the blackbirds and thrushes can't like it. I do so wonder what they say about it.'

After we had left the rookery behind us and the noise of the villagers had grown fainter, we stood and listened to the blackbirds and thrushes. She looked so joyous that I could not help saying, 'Little girl, I think you're very happy, ain't you?'

'Not quite,' she said, as though answering a question she had just been putting to herself. 'There's not enough wind.'

'Then do you like wind?' I said in surprise and delight.

'Oh, I love it!' she said rapturously. 'I can't be quite happy without wind, can you? I like to run up the hills in the wind and sing to it. That's when I am happiest. I couldn't live long without the wind.'

Now it had been a deep-rooted conviction of mine that none but the gulls and I really and truly liked the wind. 'Fishermen are muffs,' I used to say; 'they talk about the wind as though it were an enemy, just because it drowns one or two of 'em now and then. Anybody can like sunshine; muffs can like sunshine; it takes a gull or a man to like the wind!'

Such had been my egotism. But here was a girl who liked it! We reached the gate of the garden in front of Tom's cottage, and then we both stopped, looking over the neatly-kept flower-garden and the white thatched cottage behind it, up the walls of which the grape-vine leaves were absorbing the brilliance of the sunlight and softening it. Wynne was a gardener as well as an organist, and had gardens both in the front and at the back of his cottage, which was surrounded by fruit-trees. Drunkard as he was, his two passions, music and gardening, saved him from absolute degradation and ruin. His garden was beautifully kept, and I have seen him deftly pruning his vines when in such a state of drink that it was wonderful how he managed to hold a priming-knife. Winifred opened the gate, and we passed in. Wynne's little terrier, Snap, came barking to meet us.

There was an air of delicious peacefulness about the garden. This also tended to soften that hardness of temper which only cripples who have once rejoiced in their strength can possibly know, I hope.

'I like to see you look so,' said the little girl, as I melted entirely under these sweet influences. 'You looked so cross before that I was nearly afraid of you.'

And she took hold of my hand, not hesitatingly, but frankly. The little fingers clasped mine. I looked at them. They were much more sun-tanned than her face. The little rosy nails were shaped like filbert nuts.

'Why were you not quite afraid of me?' I asked.

'Because,' said she, 'under the crossness I saw that you had great love-eyes like Snap's all the while. I saw it!' she said, and laughed with delight at her great wisdom. Then she said with a sudden gravity, 'You didn't mean to make my father cry, did you, little boy?'

'No,' I said.

'And you love him?' said she.

I hesitated, for I had never told a lie in my life. My business relations with Tom had been of an entirely unsatisfactory character, and the idea of any one's loving the beery scamp presented itself in a ludicrous light. I got out of the difficulty by saying,

'I mean to love Tom very much, if I can.'

The answer did not appear to be entirely satisfactory to the little girl, but it soon seemed to pass from her mind.

That was the most delightful afternoon I had ever spent in my life. We seemed to become old friends in a few minutes, and in an hour or two she was the closest friend I had on earth. Not all the little shoeless friends in Raxton, not all the beautiful sea-gulls I loved, not all the sunshine and wind upon the sands, not all the wild bees in Graylingham Wilderness, could give the companionship this child could give. My flesh tingled with delight. (And yet all the while I was not Hal the conqueror of ragamuffins, but Hal the cripple!)

'Shall we go and get some strawberries?' she said, as we passed to the back of the house. 'They are quite ripe.'

But my countenance fell at this. I was obliged to tell her that I could not stoop.

'Ah! but I can, and I will pluck them and give them to you. I should like to do it. Do let me, there's a good boy.'

I consented, and hobbled by her side to the verge of the strawberry-beds. But when I foolishly tried to follow her, I stuck ignominiously, with my crutches sunk deep in the soft mould of rotten leaves. Here was a trial for the conquering hero of the coast. I looked into her face to see if there was not, at last, a laugh upon it. That cruel human laugh was my only dread. To everything but ridicule I had hardened myself; but against that I felt helpless.

I looked into her face to see if she was laughing at my lameness. No: her brows were merely knit with anxiety as to how she might best relieve me. This surpassingly beautiful child, then, had evidently accepted me—lameness and all—crutches and all—as a subject of peculiar interest.

How I loved her as I put my hand upon her firm little shoulders, while I extricated first one crutch and then another, and at last got upon the hard path again!

When she had landed me safely, she returned to the strawberry-bed, and began busily gathering the fruit, which she brought to me in her sunburnt hands, stained to a bright pink by the ripe fruit. Such a charm did she throw over me, that at last I actually consented to her putting the fruit into my mouth.

She then told me with much gravity that she knew how to 'cure crutches.' There was, she said, a famous 'crutches-well' in Wales, kept by St. Winifred (most likely an aunt of hers, being of the same name), whose water could 'cure crutches.' When she came from Wales again she would be sure to bring a bottle of 'crutches-water.' She told me also much about Snowdon (near which she lived), and how, on misty days, she used to 'make believe that she was the Lady of the Mist, and that she was going to visit the Tywysog o'r Niwl, the Prince of the Mist; it was so nice!'

I do not know how long we kept at this, but the organist returned and caught her in the very act of feeding me. To be caught in this ridiculous position, even by a drunken man, was more than I could bear, however, and I turned and left.

As I recall that walk home along Wilderness Road. I live it as thoroughly as I did then. I can see the rim of the sinking sun burning fiery red low down between the trees on the left, and then suddenly dropping out of sight. I can see on the right the lustre of the high-tide sea. I can hear the 'che-eu-chew, che-eu-chew.' of the wood-pigeons in Graylingham Wood. I can smell the very scent of the bean flowers drinking in the evening dews. I did not feel that I was going home as the sharp gables of the Hall gleamed through the chestnut-trees. My home for evermore was the breast of that lovely child, between whom and myself such a strange delicious sympathy had sprung up. I felt there was no other home for me.

'Why, child, where have you been?' said my mother, as she saw me trying to slip to bed unobserved, in order that happiness such as mine might not he brought into coarse contact with servants. 'Child, where have you been, and what has possessed you? Your face is positively shining with joy, and your eyes, they alarm me, they are so unnaturally bright. I hope you are not going to have an illness.'

I did not tell her, but went to my room, which now was on the ground floor, and sat watching the rooks sailing home in the sunset till the last one had gone, and the voices of the blackbirds grew less clamorous, and the trees began to look larger and larger in the dusk.

IV

The next day I was again at Wynne's cottage, and the next, and the next. We two, Winifred and I, used to stroll out together through the narrow green lanes, and over the happy fields, and about the Wilderness and the wood, and along the cliffs, and then down the gangway at Flinty Point (the only gangway that was firm enough to support my crutches, Winifred aiding me with the skill of a woman and the agility of a child), and then along the flints below Flinty Point. She rapidly fell into my habits. She was an adept in finding birds' nests and wild honey; and though she would not consent to my taking the eggs, she had not the same compunction about the honey, and she only regretted with me that we could not be exactly like St. John, as Graylingham Wilderness yielded no locusts to eat with the honey. Winifred, though the most healthy of children, had a passion for the deserted church on the cliffs, and for the desolate churchyard.

It was one of those flint and freestone churches that are sprinkled along the coast. Situated as it was at the back of a curve cut by the water into the end of a peninsula running far into the sea, the tower looked in the distance like a lighthouse. I observed after the first day of our meeting that Winifred never would mount the tower steps again. And I knew why. So delicate were her feelings, so acute did her kind little heart make her, that she would not mount steps which I could never mount.

Not that Winifred looked upon me as her little lover. There was not much of the sentimental in her. Once when I asked her on the sands if I might be her lover, she took an entirely practical view of the question, and promptly replied 'certumly,' adding, however, like the wise little woman I always found her, that she 'wasn't quite sure she knew what a lover was, but if it was anything very nice she should certumly like me to be it.'

It was the child's originality of manner that people found so captivating. One of her many little tricks and ways of an original quaintness was her habit of speaking of herself in the third person, like the merest baby. 'Winifred likes this,' 'Winifred doesn't like that,' were phrases that had an irresistible fascination for me.

Another fascinating characteristic of hers was connected with her superstitions. Whenever on parting with her I exclaimed, as I often did. 'Oh, what a lovely day we have had, Winifred!' she would look expectantly in my eyes, murmuring, 'And—and—' This meant that I was to say. 'And shall have many more such days,' as though there were a prophetic power in words.

She talked with entire seriousness of having seen in a place called Fairy Glen in Wales the Tylwyth Teg. And when I told her of Oberon and Titania, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose acquaintance I had made through Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, she said that one bright moonlight night she, in the company of two of her Gypsy playmates, Rhona Boswell and a girl called Sinfi, had visited this same Fairy Glen, when they saw the Fairy Queen alone on a ledge of rock, dressed in a green kirtle with a wreath of golden leaves about her head.

Another subject upon which I loved to hear her talk was that of the 'Knockers' of Snowdon, the guardians of undiscovered copper mines, who sometimes by knocking on the rocks gave notice to individuals they favoured of undiscovered copper, but these favoured ones were mostly children who chanced to wander up Snowdon by themselves. She had, she said, not only heard but seen these Knockers. They were thick-set dwarfs, as broad as they were long. One Knocker, an elderly female, had often played with her on the hills. Knockers' Llyn, indeed, was very much on Winifred's mind. When a golden cloud, like the one on which she was singing her song at the time I first saw her, shone over a person's head at Knockers' Llyn, it was a sign of good fortune. She was sure that it was so, because the Welsh people believed it, and so did the Gypsies.

Not a field or a hedgerow was unfamiliar to us. We were most learned in the structure of birds' nests, in the various colours of birds' eggs, and in insect architecture. In all the habits or the wild animals of the meadows we were most profound little naturalists.

Winifred could in the morning, after the dews were gone, tell by the look of a buttercup or a daisy what kind of weather was at hand, when the most cunning peasant was deceived by the hieroglyphics of the sky, and the most knowing seaman could 'make nothing of the wind.'

Her life, in fact, had been spent in the open air.

There were people staying at the Hall, and they and Frank engrossed all my mother's attention. At least, she did not appear to notice my absence from home.

My brother Frank, however, was not so unobservant (he was two years older than myself). Early one morning, before breakfast, curiosity led him to follow me, and he came upon us in Graylingham Wood as we were sitting under a tree close to the cliff, eating the wild honey we had found in the Wilderness.

He stood there swinging a ground-ash cane, and looking at her in a lordly, patronising way, the very personification no doubt of boyish beauty. I became troubled to see him look so handsome. The contrast between him and a cripple was not fair, I thought, as I observed an expression of passing admiration on little Winifred's face. Yet I thought there was not the pleased smile with which she had first greeted me, and a weight of anxiety was partially removed, for it had now become quite evident to me that I was as much in love as any swain of eighteen—it had become quite evident that without Winifred the poor little shattered sea-gull must perish altogether. She was literally my world.

Frank came and sat down with us, and made himself as agreeable as possible. He tried to enter into our play, but we were too slow for him; he soon became restless and impatient. 'Oh bother!' he said, and got up and left us.

I drew a sigh of relief when he was gone.

'Do you like my brother, Winifred?' I said.

'Yes.' she said.

'Why?'

'Because he is so pretty and so nimble. I believe he could run up—' and then she stopped; but I knew what the complete sentence would have been. She was going to say: 'I believe he could run up the gangways without stopping to take breath.'

Here was a stab; but she did not notice the effect of her unfinished sentence. Then a question came from me involuntarily.

'Winifred,' I said, 'do you like him as well as you like me?'

'Oh no,' she said, in a tone of wonderment that such a question should be asked.

'But I am not pretty and—'

'Oh, but you are!' she said eagerly, interrupting me.

'But,' I said, with a choking sensation in my voice, 'I am lame.' and
I looked at the crutches lying among the ferns beside me.

'Ah, but I like you all the better for being lame,' she said, nestling up to me.

'But you like nimble boys,' I said, 'such as Frank.'

She looked puzzled. The anomaly of liking nimble boys and crippled boys at the same time seemed to strike her. Yet she felt it was so, though it was difficult to explain it.

'Yes, I do like nimble boys,' she said at last, plucking with her fingers at a blade of grass she held between her teeth. 'But I think I like lame boys better, that is if they are—if they are—you.'

I gave an exclamation of delight. But she was two years younger than
I, and scarcely, I suppose, understood it.

'He is very pretty,' she said meditatively, 'but he has not got love-eyes like you and Snap, and I don't think I could love any little boy so very, very much now who wasn't lame.'

She loved me in spite of my lameness; she loved me because I was lame, so that if I had not fallen from the cliffs, if I had sustained my glorious position among the boys of Raxton and Graylingham as 'Fighting Hal.' I might never have won little Winifred's love. Here was a revelation of the mingled yarn of life, that I remember struck me even at that childish age.

I began to think I might, in spite of the undoubted crutches, resume my old place as the luckiest boy along the sands. She loved me because I was lame! Those who say that physical infirmity does not feminise the character have not had my experience. No more talk for me that morning. In such a mood as that there can be no talk. I sat in a silent dream, save when a sweet sob of delight would come up like a bubble from the heaving waters of my soul. I had passed into that rare and high mood when life's afflictions are turned by love to life's deepest, holiest joys. I had begun early to learn and know the gamut of the affections.

'When, you leave me here and go home to Wales you will never forget me. Winnie?'

'Never, never!' she said, as she helped me from the ferns which were still as wet with dew as though it had been raining. 'I will think of you every night before I go to sleep, and always end my prayers as I did that first night after I saw you so lonely in the churchyard.'

'And how is that, Winnie?' I said, as she adjusted my crutches for me.

'After I've said "Amen," I always say, "And, dear Lord Jesus, don't forget to love dear Henry, who can't get up the gangways without me," and I will say that every night as long as I live.'

From that morning I considered her altogether mine. Her speaking of me as the 'dear little English boy,' however, as she did, marred the delight her words gave me. I had from the first observed that the child's strongest passion was a patriotism of a somewhat fiery kind. The word English in her mouth seemed some-times a word of reproach: it was the name of the race that in the past had invaded her sacred Snowdonia.

I afterwards learnt that her aunt was answerable for this senseless prejudice.

'Winnie,' I said, 'don't you wish I was a Welsh boy?'

'Oh yes,' she said.'Don't you?' I made no answer.

She looked into my face and said, 'And yet I don't think I could love a Welsh boy as I love you.'

She then repeated to me a verse of a Welsh song, which of course I did not understand a word of until she told me what it meant in English.

It was an address to Snowdon, and ran something like this—

Mountain-wild Snowdon for me!
Sweet silence there for the harp,
Where loiter the ewes and the lambs
In the moss and the rushes,
Where one's song goes sounding up!
And the rocks re-echo it higher and higher
In the height where the eagles live.

In this manner about six weeks slid away, and Winnie's visit to her father came to an end. I ask, how can people laugh at the sorrows of childhood? The bitterness of my misery as I sat with that child on the eve of her departure for Wales (which to me seemed at the extreme end of the earth) was almost on a par with anything I have since suffered, and that is indeed saying a great deal. It was in Wynne's cottage, and I sat on the floor with her wet cheeks close to mine, saying, 'She leaves me alone.' Tom tried to console me by telling me that Winifred would soon come back.

'But when?' I said.

'Next year,' said Tom.

He might as well have said next century, for any consolation it gave me. The idea of a year without her was altogether beyond my grasp. It seemed infinite.

Week after week passed, and month after month, and little Winifred was always in my thoughts. Wynne's cottage was a sacred spot to me, and the organist the most interesting man in the world. I never tired of asking him questions about her, though he, as I soon found, knew scarcely anything concerning her and what she was doing, and cared less; for love of drink had got thoroughly hold of him.

Letters were scarce visitants to him, and I believe he never used to hear from Wales at all.

V

At the end of the year she came again, and I had about a year of happiness. I was with her every day, and every day she grew more necessary to my existence.

It was at this time that I made the acquaintance of Winnie's friend Rhona Boswell, a charming little Gypsy girl. Graylingham Wood and Rington Wood, like the entire neighbourhood, were favourite haunts of a superior kind of Gypsies called Griengroes, that is to say, horse-dealers. Their business was to buy ponies in Wales and sell them in the Eastern Counties and the East Midlands. Thus it was that Winnie had known many of the East Midland Gypsies in Wales. Compared with Rhona Boswell, who was more like a fairy than a child, Winnie seemed quite a grave little person. Rhona's limbs were always on the move, and the movement sprang always from her emotions. Her laugh seemed to ring through the woods like silver bells, a sound that it was impossible to mistake for any other. The laughter of most Gypsy girls is full of music and of charm, and yet Rhona's laughter was a sound by itself, and it was no doubt this which afterwards when she grew up attracted my kinsman, Percy Aylwin, towards her. It seemed to emanate not from her throat merely, but from her entire frame. If one could imagine a strain of merriment and fun blending with the ecstatic notes of a skylark soaring and singing, one might form some idea of the laugh of Rhona Boswell. Ah, what days they were! Rhona would come from Gypsy Dell, a romantic place in Rington Manor some miles off, especially to show us some newly devised coronet of flowers that she had been weaving for herself. This induced Winnie to weave for herself a coronet of sea-weeds, and an entire morning was passed in grave discussion as to which coronet excelled the other.

A year had made a great difference in Winnie, a much greater difference than it had made in me. Her aunt, who was no doubt a well-informed woman, had been attending to her education. In a single year she had taught her French so thoroughly that Winnie was in the midst of Dumas' Monte Cristo. And apart from education in the ordinary acceptation of the word, the expansion of her mind had been rapid and great.

Her English vocabulary was now far above mine, far above that of most children of her age. This I discovered was owing to the fact that a literary English lady of delicate health, Miss Dalrymple, whose slender means obliged her to leave the Capel Curig Hotel, had been staying at the cottage as a lodger. She had taken I the greatest delight in educating Winnie. Of course Winnie lost as well as gained by this change. She was a little Welsh rustic no longer, but a little lady unusually well equipped, as far as education went, for taking her place in the world.

She understood fully now what I meant when I told her that we were betrothed, and again showed that mingling of child-wisdom and poetry which characterised her by suggesting that we should be married on Snowdon, and that her wedding-dress should be the green kirtle and wreath of the fairies, and that her bridesmaids should be her Gypsy friends, Sinfi Lovell and Rhona Boswell. This I acceded to with alacrity.

It was now that I fully realised for the first time her extraordinary gift of observation and her power of describing what she had observed in the graphic language that can never be taught save by the teacher Nature herself. In a dozen picturesque words she would flash upon my very senses the scene that she was describing. So vividly did she bring before my eyes the scenery of North Wales, that when at last I went there it seemed quite familiar to me. And so in describing individuals, her pictures of them were like photographs.

Graylingham Wood was our favourite haunt. This place and the adjoining piece of waste land, called the Wilderness, had for us all the charms of a primeval forest. Here in the early spring we used to come and watch the first violet uplifting its head from the dark green leaves behind the mossy boles, and listen for the first note of the blackcap, the nightingale's herald, and the first coo of the wood-pigeons among the bare and newly-budding trees. And here, in the summer, we used to come as soon as breakfast was over with as many story-books as we could carry, and sit on the grass and revel in the wonders of the Arabian Nights. the Tales of the Genii, and the Seven Champions of Christendom, till all the leafy alleys of the wood were glittering with armed knights and Sinbads and Aladdins. The story of Camaralzaman and Badoura was, I think, Winnie's chief favourite. She could repeat it almost word for word. The idea of the two lovers being carried to each other by genii through the air and over the mountain tops had an especial fascination for her. I was Camaralzaman and she Badoura, and the genii would carry me to her as she sat by Knockers' Llyn, or, as she called it, Llyn Coblynau, on the lower slopes of Snowdon.

But above all, there was the sea on the other side of the wood, of the presence of which we were always conscious—the sea, of which we could often catch glimpses between the trees, lending a sense of freedom and wonder and romance such as no landscape can lend. Our great difficulty of course was in connection with my lameness. Few children would have tried to convey a pair of crutches and a lame leg down the cliff to the long level brown sands that lay, farther than the eye could reach, stretched beneath miles on miles of brown crumbling cliffs, whose jagged points and indentations had the kind of spectral look peculiar to that coast. For, alas! the holy water Winifred brought did not 'cure the crutches.' Yet we used to master the difficulty, always selecting the firmer gangway at Flinty Point, and always waiting, before making the attempt, until there was no one near to see us toiling down. Once down on the hard sands just below the Point, we were happy, paddling and enjoying ourselves till the sunset told us that we must begin our herculean labour of hoisting the leg and crutches up the gangway back to the wood. I have performed many athletic feats since my cure, but nothing comparable to the feat of climbing with crutches up those paths of yielding sand. Once we found on the sand a newly shot gull. She took it in her lap and mourned over it. I guessed who was the poor bird's murderer—her father!

We knew Nature in all her moods. In every aspect we found the sea, the wood, and the meadows happy and beautiful—in winter as in summer, in storm as in sunshine. In the foggy days of November, in the sharp winds of March, in the snows and sleet and rain of February, we used to hear other people complain of the bad weather; we used to hear them fret for change. But we despised them for their ignorance where we were so learned. There was no bad weather for us. In March, what so delicious as breasting together the brave wind, and feeling it tingle our cheeks and beat our ears till we laughed at each other with joy? In rain, what so delicious as to stand under a tree or behind a hedge and listen to the drops pattering overhead among the leaves, and see the fields steaming up to meet them? Then again the soft falling of snow upon the lonely fields, while the very sheep looked brown against the whiteness gathering round them. All beautiful to us two, and beloved!

VI

'But where was this little boy's mother all this time?' you naturally ask; 'where was his father? In a word, who was he? and what were his surroundings?'

I will answer these queries in as brief a fashion as possible.

My father, Philip Aylwin, belonged to a branch of an ancient family which had been satirically named by another branch of the same family 'The Proud Aylwins.'

It is a singular thing that it was the proud Aylwins who had a considerable strain of Gypsy blood in their veins. My great-grandfather had married Fenella Stanley, the famous Gypsy beauty, about whom so much was written in the newspapers and magazines of that period. She had previously when a girl of sixteen married a Lovell who died and left a child. Fenella's portrait in the character of the Sibyl of Snowdon was painted by the great portrait painter of that time.

This picture still hangs in the portrait gallery of Raxton Hall.

As a child it had an immense attraction for me, and no wonder, for it was original to actual eccentricity. It depicted a dark young woman of dazzling beauty standing at break of day among mountain scenery, holding a musical instrument of the guitar kind, but shaped like a violin, upon the lower strings of which she was playing with the thumb of the left hand.

Through the misty air were seen all kinds of shadowy shapes, whose eyes were fixed on the player. I used to stand and look at this picture by the hour together, fascinated by the strange beauty of the singer's face and the mysterious, prophetic expression in the eyes.

And I used to try to imagine what tune it was that could call from the mountain air the 'flower sprites' and 'sunshine elves' of morning on the mountain.

Fenella Stanley seems in her later life to have set up as a positive seeress, and I infer from certain family papers and diaries in my possession that she was the very embodiment of the wildest Romany beliefs and superstitions.

I first became conscious of the mysterious links which, bound me to my Gypsy ancestress by reading one of her letters to my great-grandfather, who had taught her to write: nothing apparently could have taught her to spell. It was written during a short stay she was making away from him in North Wales. It described in the simplest (and often the most uncouth) words that Nature-ecstasy which the Romanies seem to feel in the woodlands. It came upon me like a revelation, for it was the first time I had ever seen embodied in words the sensations which used to come to me in Graylingham Wood or on the river that ran through it. After long basking among the cowslips, or beneath the whispering branches of an elm, whose shade I was robbing from the staring cows around, or lying on my hack in a boat on the river, listening to the birds and the insect hum and all the magic music of summer in the woodlands, I used all at once to feel as though the hand of a great enchantress were being waved before me and around me. The wheels of thought would stop; all the senses would melt into one, and I would float on a tide of unspeakable joy, a tide whose waves were waves neither of colour, nor perfume, nor melody, but new waters born of the mixing of these; and through a language deeper than words and deeper than thoughts, I would seem carried at last close to an actual consciousness—a consciousness which, to my childish dreams, seemed drawing me close to the bosom of a mother whose face would brighten into that of Feuella.

My father lived upon moderate means in the little seaside town of Raxton. My mother was his second wife, a distant cousin of the same name. She was not one of the 'Proud Aylwins,' and yet she must have had more pride in her heart than all the 'Proud Aylwins' put together. Her feeling in relation to the strain of Gypsy blood in the family into which she had married was that of positive terror. She associated the word 'Gypsy' with everything that is wild, passionate, and lawless.

One great cause undoubtedly of her partiality for Frank and her dislike of me was that Frank's blue-eyed Saxon face showed no sign whatever of the Romany strain, while my swarthy face did.

As I write this, she lives before me with more vividness than my father, for the reason that her character during my childhood, before I came to know my father thoroughly—before I came to know what a marvellous man he was—seemed to be a thousand times more vivid than his. With her bright grey eyes, her patrician features, I shall see her while memory lasts. The only differences that ever arose between my father and my other were connected with the fact that my father had a former wife. Now and then (not often) my mother would lose her stoical self-command, and there would come from her an explosion of jealous anger, stormy and terrible. This was on occasions when she perceived bat my father's memory retained too vividly the impression left on it of his love for the wife who was dead—dead, but a rival still. My father lived in mortal fear of this jealousy. Yet my mother was a devoted and a fond wife. I remember in especial the flash that would come from her eyes, the fiery flush that would overspread her face, whenever she saw my father open certain antique silver casket which he kept in his escritoire when at home, and carried about with him when travelling. The casket (I soon learned) contained momentos of his first wife, between whom and himself there seems to have been a deep natural sympathy such did not exist between my mother and him. This first wife he had lost under peculiarly painful circum-stances, which it is necessary that I should briefly narrate. She had been drowned before his very eyes that cove beneath the church which I have already described.

This semicircular indentation at the end of the peninsula or headland on which the church stood was specially dangerous in two ways. It was a fatal spot where sea and land were equally treacherous. On the sands the tide, and on the cliffs the landslip, imperilled the lives of the unwary. Half, at least, of the churchyard had been condemned as 'dangerous,' and this very same spot was the only one on the coast where the pedestrian along the sands ran any serious risk of being entrapped by the tide; for the peninsula on which the church stood jutted out for a considerable distance into the sea, and then was scooped out in the form of a boot-jack, and so caught the full force of the waves. One corner, as already mentioned, was called Flinty Point, the other Needle Point, and between these two points there was no gangway within the semicircle up the wall of cliff. Indeed, within the cove the cliff was perpendicular, or rather overhanging, as far as such crumbling earth would admit of its overhanging. To reach a gangway, a person inside the cove would have to leave the cliff wall for the open sands, and pass round either Needle Point or Flinty Point. Hence the cove was sometimes called Mousetrap Cove, because when the tide reached so high as to touch these two points, a person on the sands within the cove was caught as in a mousetrap, and the only means of extrication was by boat from the sea. It was the irresistible action of the sea upon the peninsula (called Church Headland) that had doomed church and churchyard to certain destruction.

Dangerous as was this cove, there was something peculiarly fascinating about it. The black, smooth, undulating boulders that dotted the sand here and there formed the most delightful seats upon which to meditate or read. It was a favourite spot with my father's first wife, who had been a Swiss governess. She was a great reader and student, but it was not till after her death that my father became one. The poor lady was fond of bringing her books to the cove, and pursuing her studies or meditations with the sound of the sea's chime in her ears. My father, at that time I believe a simple, happy country squire, but showing strong signs of his Romany ancestry, had often warned her of the risk she ran, and one day he had the agony of seeing her from the cliff locked in the cove, and drowning before his eyes ere a boat could be got, while he and the coastguard stood powerless to reach her.

The effect of this shock demented my father for a time. How it was that he came to marry again I could never understand. During my childhood he had, as far as I could see, no real sympathy with anything save his own dreams. In after years I came to know the truth. He was kind enough in disposition, but he looked upon us, his children, as his second wife's property, his dreams as his own. Once every year he used to go to Switzerland and stay there for several weeks; and, as the object of these journeys was evidently to revisit the old spots made sacred to him by reminiscences of his romantic love for his first wife, it may he readily imagined that they were not looked upon with any favour by my mother. She never accompanied him on these occasions, nor would she let Frank do so—another proof of the early partiality she showed for my brother. As I was of less importance, my father (previous to my accident) used to take me, to my intense delight and enjoyment; but during the period of my lameness he went to Switzerland alone.

It was during one of my childish visits to Switzerland that I learnt an important fact in connection with my father and his first wife—the fact that since her death he had become a mystic and had joined a certain sect of mystics founded by Lavater.

This is how I came to know it. My attention had been arrested by a book lying on my father's writing-table—a large book called 'The Veiled Queen, by Philip Aylwin'—and I began to read it. The statements therein were of an astounding kind, and the idea of a beautiful woman behind a veil completely fascinated my childish mind. And the book was full of the most amazing stories collected from all kinds of outlandish sources. One story, called 'The Flying Donkey of the Ruby Hills,' riveted my attention so much that it possessed me, and even now I feel that I can repeat every word of it. It was a story of a donkey-driver, who, having lost his wife Alawiyah, went and lived alone in the ruby hills of Badakhshan, where the Angel of Memory fashioned for him out of his own sorrow and tears an image of his wife. This image was mistaken by a townsman named Hasan for his own wife, and Ja'afar was summoned before the Ka'dee. Afterwards, when The Veiled Queen came into my possession, I noticed that this story was quoted for motto on the title-page:

'Then quoth the Ka'dee, laughing until his grinders appeared: "Rather, by Allah, would I take all the punishment thou dreadest, thou most false donkey-driver of the Ruby Hills, than believe this story of thine—this mad, mad story, that she with whom thou wast seen was not the living wife of Hasan here (as these four legal witnesses have sworn), but thine own dead spouse, Alawiyah, refashioned for thee by the Angel of Memory out of thine own sorrow and unquenchable fountain of tears."

'Quoth Ja'afar, bowing low his head: "Bold is the donkey-driver, O Ka'dee! and bold the Ka'dee who dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve—not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah—not knowing in any wise his own heart and what it shall some day suffer."'

This story so absorbed me that when my father re-entered the house I was perfectly unconscious of his presence. He took the book from me, saying that it was not a book for children. It possessed my mind for some days. What I had read in it threw light upon certain conversations in French and German which I had heard between my father and his Swiss friends, and the fact gradually dawned upon me that he believed himself to be in direct communication with the spirit of his dead wife. This so acted upon my imagination that I began to feel that she was actually alive, though invisible. I told Frank when I got home that we had another mother in Switzerland, and that I our father went to Switzerland to see her.

Having at that time a passionate love for my mother (a love none the less passionate because somewhat coldly returned), I felt great anger against this resuscitated rival; but Frank only laughed and called me a stupid little fool.

Luckily Frank forgot my story in a minute, and it never reached my mother's ears.

I Some years after this an odd incident occurred. The I idea of a veiled lady had, as I say, fascinated me. One Raxton fair-day I induced Winnie to be photographed on the sands, wearing a crown of sea-flowers in imitation of Rhona Boswell's famous wild-flower coronet, and a necklace of seaweed, with Frank and another boy lifting from her head a long white veil of my mother's. My father accidentally saw this photograph, and was so taken with it that he adorned the title-page of the third edition of The Veiled Queen with a small woodcut of it.

These vagaries of my father's had an influence upon my destiny of the most tragic, yet of the most fantastic kind.

He had the reputation, I believe, of being one of the most learned mystics of his time. He was a fair Hebrew scholar, and also had a knowledge of Sanscrit, Arabic, and Persian. His passion for philology was deep-rooted. He was a no less ardent numismatist. Moreover, he was deeply versed in amulet-lore. He wrote a treatise upon 'amulets' and their inscriptions. All this was after the death of his first wife. He had a large collection of amulets, Gnostic gems, and abraxas stones. That he really believed in the virtue of amulets will be pretty clearly seen as my narrative proceeds. Indeed, the subject of amulets and love-tokens became a mania with him. After his death it was said that his collection of amulets, Egyptian, Gnostic, and other, was rarer, and his collection of St. Helena coins larger, than any other collection in England.

Though my mother did not know of the spiritualistic orgies in Switzerland, she knew that my father was a spiritualist. And this vexed her, not only because she conceived it to be visionary folly, but because it was 'low.' She knew that it led him to join a newly-formed band of Latter-Day mystics which had been organised at Raxton, but luckily she did not know that through them he believed himself to be holding communication with his first wife. The members of this body were tradespeople of the town, and I quite think that in my mother's eyes all tradespeople were low.

As to her indifference towards me,—that is easily explained. I was an incorrigible little bohemian by nature. She despaired of ever changing me. During several years this indifference distressed me, though it in no way diminished my affection for her. At last, however, I got accustomed to it and accepted it as inevitable. But the remarkable thing was that Frank's affection for his mother was of the most languid kind. He was an open-hearted boy, and never took advantage of my mother's favouritism. Thus I was left entirely to my own resources. My little love-idyl with Winifred was for a long time unknown to my mother, and no amount of ocular demonstration could have made it known (in such a dream was he) to my father.

On one occasion, however, my mother, having been struck by her beauty at church, told Wynne to bring her to the house, little thinking what she was doing. Accordingly, Winifred came one evening and charmed my mother, charmed the entire household, by her grace of manner. My mother, upon whom what she called 'style' made a far greater impression than anything else, pronounced her to be a perfect little lady, and I heard her remark that she wondered how the child of such a scapegrace as Wynne could have been so reared.

Unfortunately I was not old enough to disguise the transports of delight that set my heart beating and my crippled limbs trembling as I saw Winifred gliding like a fairy about the house and gardens, and petted even by my proud and awful mother. My mother did not fail to notice this, and before long she had got from Frank the history of our little loves, and even of the 'cripple water' from St. Winifred's Well. I partly heard what Frank was telling her, and I was the only one to notice the expression of displeasure that overspread her features. She did not, however, show it to the child, but she never invited her there again, and from that evening was much more vigilant over my movements, lest I should go to Wynne's cottage. I still, however, continued to meet Winifred in Graylingham Wood during her stay with her father; and at last, when she again left me, I felt desolate indeed.

I wrote her a letter, and took it to him to address. He was very fond of showing his penmanship, which was remarkably good. He had indeed been well educated, though from his beer-house associations he had entirely caught the rustic accent. I saw him address it, and took it myself to the post-office at Rington, where I was not so well known as at Raxton, but I never got any reply.

And who was Tom Wynne? Though the organist of the new church at Raxton, and custodian of the old deserted church on the cliffs, he was the local ne'er-do-well, drunkard, and scapegrace. He was, however, a well-connected man, reduced to his present position by drink. He had lived in Raxton until he returned to Wales, which was his birthplace—having obtained there some appointment the nature of which I never could understand. In Wales he had got married; and there his wife had died shortly after the birth of Winnie. It was no doubt through his intemperate habits that he lost his post in Wales. It was then that he again came to Raxton, leaving the child with his sister-in-law.

Raxton stands on that part of the coast where the land-springs most persistently disintegrate the hills and render them helpless against the ravages of the sea. Perhaps even within the last few centuries the spot called Mousetrap Cove, scooped out of the peninsula on which the old church stands, was dry land. The old Raxton church at the end of this peninsula had, not many years since, to be deserted for a new one, lest it should some day carry its congregation with it when it slides, as it soon will slide, into the sea. But as none had dared to pull down the old church, a custodian had to be found who for a pittance would take charge of it and of the important monuments it contains. Such a custodian was found in Wynne, who lived in the cottage already described on the Wilderness Road. Along this road (which passed both the new church and the old) I was frequently journeying, and Wynne's tall burly form and ruddy face were, even before I knew Winnie, a certain comfort to me.

He was said to be the last remnant of an old family that once owned much land in the neighbourhood, and he was still the recipient of a small pension. My father used to say that Wynne's family was even exceptionally good, that it laid claim to being descended from a still older Welsh family. But my mother scorned the idea, and always treated the organist as belonging to the lower classes. It was Wynne who had taught me swimming. It was really he, and not my groom, who had taught me how to ride a horse along the low-tide sands so as not to distress him or damage his feet.

It was about this time that my uncle Aylwin of Alvanley, my mother's brother, who had quarrelled with her, became reconciled to her, and came to Raxton. He at once recommended that a friend of his, a famous London surgeon, should he consulted about my lameness. I accordingly went with him to London to be placed under the treatment of the eminent man. Had this been done earlier, what a world of suffering might have been spared me! The man of science pronounced my ailment to be quite curable.

He performed an operation upon the leg, and after a long and careful course of treatment in town, advised that I should go to Margate for a long stay, and avail myself of that change of air. I went, accompanied by my mother and brother, and stayed there several months. My father used to come to see us once a month or so, stay for a week, and then go back.

I now wrote another letter to Winifred, and after a long delay, got a reply, but it consisted mainly of descriptions of the way in which she paddled in the Welsh brooks and of lessons in the shawl-dance which she was taking from Shuri Lovell, the mother of her Gypsy friend. So vividly did she describe these lessons that her pictures haunted me. I wrote in reply to this a letter burning with my ever-growing love, but to this I got no reply.

As the surgeon had prophesied, I made such advance that I was after a while able to walk with tolerable ease without my crutches, by the aid of a walking-stick; and as time went on, the tonic effect of Margate air, aiding the remedies prescribed by the surgeon, worked such a change in me that I was pronounced well, and the doctor said I might return home. I returned to Raxton a cripple no longer.

I returned cured. I say. But how entangled is this web of our life! How almost impossible is it that good should come unmixed with evil, or evil unmixed with good! At Margate, where the bracing air did more, I doubt not, towards my restoration to health than all the medicines,—at Margate my brother drank in his death-poison.

During the very last days of our stay he caught scarlet fever. In a fortnight he was dead. The shock to me was very severe. It laid my mother prostrate for months.

I was now by the death of Frank the representative of our branch of the family, and a little fellow of uncomfortable importance. My uncle Aylwin of Alvanley. being childless, was certain to leave me his large estates, for he had dropped entirely away from the Aylwins of Rington Manor, and also from the branch of the Aylwin family represented by my kinsman Cyril.

II

THE MOONLIGHT CROSS OF THE GNOSTICS

I

My mother had some prejudice against a public school, and I was sent to a large and important private one at Cambridge.

And go, with Winifred on my mind, I went one damp winter's morning to
Dullingham, our nearest railway station, on my way to Cambridge.

As concerns my school-days, I feel that all that will interest the reader is this: as I rode through mile upon mile of the flat, wide-stretching country, I made to myself a vow in connection with Winifred,—a vow that when I left school I would do a certain thing in relation to her, though Fate itself should say, 'This thing shall not be done.' I did not know then, as I know now, how weak is human will enmeshed in that web of Circumstance that has been a-weaving since the beginning of the world.

I left school without the slightest notion as to what my future course in life was to be. I was to take my rich uncle's property. That was understood now. And although my mother never talked of the matter, I could see in the pensive gaze she bent on me an ever-present consciousness of a future for me more golden still.

But now I formed a new intimacy, and one of a very singular kind—an intimacy with my father, who suddenly woke up to the fact that I was no longer a child. It occurred on my making some pertinent inquiries about a certain Gnostic amulet representing the Gorgon's head, a prize of which he had lately become the happy possessor. On his telling me that the Arabic word for amulet was hamalet, and that the word meant 'that which is suspended,' I said in a perfectly thoughtless way that very likely one of the learned societies to which he belonged might be able to trace some connection between 'hamalet' and the 'Hamlet' of Shakespeare. These idle and ignorant words of mine fell, as I found, upon a mind ripe to receive them. He looked straight before him at the bust of Shakespeare on the bookshelves as he always looked when his rudderless imagination was once well launched, and I heard him mutter, 'Hamlet—the Amleth of Saxo-Grammaticus,—hamalet, "that which is suspended." The world, to Hamlet's metaphysical mind, was "suspended" in the wide region of Nowhere—in an infinite ocean of Nothing. Why did I not think of this before? Strange that this child should hit upon it.' Then looking at me as though he had just seen me for the first time in his life, he said. 'How old are you, child?' 'Eighteen, father, I said. 'Eighteen years?' he asked. 'Yes, father,' I said with some pique. 'Did you suppose I meant eighteen months?' 'Only eighteen years,' he muttered, 'a mere baby, in short; and yet he has hit upon what we Shakespearians have been boggling over for many year?—the symbolical meaning involved in Hamlet's name. Henry, I prophesy great things for you.'

An intimacy was cemented between us at once. One of the results of this conversation was my father's elaborate paper, read before one of his societies, in which he maintained that Shakespeare's Hamlet was a metaphysical poem, the great central idea of which was involved in the name Hamlet, Amleth, or Hamalet—the idea that the universe, suspended in the wide region of Nowhere, lies, an amulet, upon the breast of the Great Latona,—a paper that was the basis of his reputation in 'the higher criticism.'

Shortly after this my father and I spent the autumn in various parts of Switzerland. One night, when we were sitting outside the chalet in the full light of the moon, I was the witness of a display of passion on the part of one whom I had always considered to be a dreamy book-worm—a passionless, eccentric mystic—that simply amazed me. A flickering tongue from the central fires suddenly breaking up through the soil of an English vegetable garden could hardly have been a more unexpected phenomenon to me than what occurred on that memorable night.

The incident I am going to relate showed me how rash it is to suppose that you have really fathomed the personality of any human creature. The mementos of his first wife, which accompanied him whithersoever he went, absorbed his attention in Switzerland, and especially in the little place where she was born, far more than they had done at home. He was for ever peeping furtively into his escritoire to enjoy the sight of them, and then looking over his shoulder to see if he was being watched by my mother, though she was far away in Raxton Hall. On the night in question he showed me the silver casket containing certain of these mementos—mementos which I felt to be almost too intimate to be shown even to his son.

'And now, Henry,' said he, 'I am going to show you something that no one else has ever seen since she died—the most sacred possession I have upon this earth.' He then opened his shirt and his vest, and showed me lying upon his naked bosom a beautiful jewelled cross of a considerable size. 'This,' said he, lifting it up, 'is an ancient Gnostic amulet. It is called the "Moonlight Cross" of the Gnostics. I gave it to her on the night of our betrothal. She was a Roman Catholic. It is made of precious stones cut in facets, with rubies and diamonds and beryls so cunningly set that, when the moonlight falls on them, the cross flashes almost as brilliantly as when the sunlight falls on them and is kindled into living fire. These deep-coloured crimson rubies—almost as clear as diamonds—are not of the ordinary kind. They are true "Oriental rubies," and the jewellers would tell you that the mine which produced them has been lost during several centuries. But look here when I lift it up; the most wonderful feature of the jewel is the skill with which the diamonds are cut. The only shapes generally known are what are called the "brilliant" and the "rose," but here the facets are arranged in an entirely different way, and evidently with the view of throwing light into the very hearts of the rubies, and producing this peculiar radiance.'

He lifted the amulet again (which was suspended from his neck by a beautifully worked cord made of soft brown hair) into the rays from the moon. The light the jewel emitted was certainly of a strange and fascinating kind. The cross had been worn with the jewelled front upon his bosom instead of the smooth back, and the sharp facets of the cross had lacerated the scarred flesh underneath in a most cruel manner. He saw me shudder and understood why.

'Oh, I like that!' he said, with an ecstatic smile. 'I like to feel it constantly on my bosom. It cannot cut deep enough for me. This is her hair,' he said, taking the hair-cord between his fingers and kissing it.

'How do you manage to exist, father,' I said, 'with that heavy sharp-edged jewel on your breast? you who cannot bear the gout with patience?'

'Exist? I could not exist without it. The gout is pain—this is not pain; it is joy, bliss, heaven! When I am dead it must lie for ever on my breast as it lies now, or I shall never rest in my grave.' He had been talking about amulets in the most quiet and matter-of-fact way during that morning; but the I moment he produced this cross a strange change came over his face, something like the change that will come over a dull wood-fire when blown by the wind into a bright light of flame.

'Ha!' he muttered to himself, as his eyes widened and sparkled with a look of intense eagerness and his hand shook, sending the light of the beautiful jewel all about the room, 'it is a sad pity he was not her son. How I should have loved him then! I like him now very much; but how I should have loved him then, for he is a brave boy. Oh, if I had only been born brave like him!' Then, suddenly recollecting himself, he closed his vest, and said: 'Don't tell your mother, Hal; don't tell your mother that I have shown you this.' Then he took it out again. 'She who is dead cherished it,' he continued, half to himself—'she cherished it above all things. She died, boy, and I couldn't help her. She used to wear the cross in the bosom of her dress; and there she was in the cove kissing it when the tide swept over her. I ought to have jumped down and died with her. You would have done it, Hal; your eyes say so. Oh, to be an Aylwin without the Aylwin courage!'

After a little time he said: 'This has lain on her bosom, Hal, her bosom! It has been kissed by her, Hal, oh, a thousand thousand times! It had her last kiss. When I took it from the cold body which had been recovered, this cross seemed to be warm with her life and love.'

And then he wept, and his tears fell thick upon his bosom and upon the amulet. The truth was clear enough now. The appalling death of his first wife, his love for her, and his remorse for not having jumped down the cliff and died with her, had affected his brain. He was a monomaniac, and all his thoughts were in some way clustered round the dominant one. He had studied amulets because the 'Moonlight Cross' had been cherished by her; he came to Switzerland every year because it was associated with her; he had joined the spiritualist body in the mad hope that perhaps there might be something in it, perhaps there might be a power that could call her back to earth. Even the favourite occupation of his life, visiting cathedrals and churches and taking rubbings from monumental brasses, had begun after her death; it had come from the fact (as I soon learned) that she had taken interest in monumental brasses, and had begun the collection of rubbings.

And yet this martyr to a mighty passion bore the character of a dreamy student; and his calm, un-furrowed face, on common occasions, expressed nothing but a rather dull kind of content! Here was a revelation of what, afterwards, was often revealed to me, that human personality is the crowning wonder of this wonderful universe, and that the forces which turn fire-mist into stars are not more inscrutable than is human character. He lifted up his head and gazed at me through his tears.

'Hal,' he said, 'do you know why I have shown you this? It must, MUST be buried with me at my death; and there is no one upon whose energy, truth, courage, and strength of will I can rely as I can upon yours. You must give me your word, Hal, that you will see it and this casket containing her letters buried with me.'

I hesitated to become a party to such an undertaking as this. It savoured of superstition, I thought. Now, having at that very time abandoned all the superstitions and all the mystical readings of the universe which as a child I had inherited from ancestors, Romany and English, having at that very time begun to take a delight in the wonderful revelations of modern science, my attitude towards superstition—towards all super-naturalism—oscillated between anger and simple contempt.

'But,' I said, 'you surely will not have this beautiful old cross buried?' And as I looked at it, and the light fell upon it, there came from it strange flashes of fire, showing with what extraordinary skill the rubies and diamonds had been adjusted so that their facets should catch and concentrate the rays of the moon.

'Yes,' he said, taking the cross again in his hand and fondling it passionately, 'it must never be possessed by any one after me.'

'But it might be stolen, father—stolen from your coffin.'

'That would indeed he a disaster,' he said with a shudder. Then a look of deadly vengeance overspread his face and brought out all its Romany characteristics as he said: 'But with it there will be buried a curse written in Hebrew and English—a curse upon the despoiler, which will frighten off any thief who is in his senses.'

And he showed me a large parchment scroll, folded exactly like a title-deed, with the following curse and two verses from the 109th Psalm written upon it in Hebrew and English. The English version was carefully printed by himself in large letters:—

'He who shall violate this tomb.—he who shall steal this amulet,
hallowed as a love-token between me and my dead wife,—he who shall
dare to lay a sacrilegious hand upon this cross, stands cursed by
God. cursed by love, and cursed by me. Philip Aylwin, lying here.

"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." Psalm cix. So saith the Lord. Amen.'

'I have printed the English version in large letters,' he said, 'so that any would-be despoiler must see it and read it at once by the dimmest lantern light.'

'But, father,' I said, 'is it possible that you, an educated man, really believe in the efficacy of a curse?'

'If the curse comes straight from the heart's core of a man, as this curse comes from mine, Hal, how can it fail to operate by the mere force of will? The curse of a man who loved as I love upon the wretch who should violate a love-token so sacred as this—why, the disembodied spirits of all who have loved and suffered would combine to execute it!'

'Spirits!' I said. 'Really, father, in times like these to talk of spirits!'

'Ah, Henry!' he replied, 'I was like you once. I could once be content with Materialism—I could find it supportable once; but, should you ever come to love as I have loved (and, for your own happiness, child, I hope you never may), you will And that Materialism is intolerable, is hell itself, to the heart that has known a passion like mine. You will And that it is madness, Hal, madness, to believe in the word "never"! you will And that you dare not leave untried any creed, howsoever wild, that offers the heart a ray of hope. Every object she cherished has become spiritualised, sublimated, has become alive—alive as this amulet is alive. See, the lights are no natural lights.' And again he held it up.

'If on my death-bed,' he continued, 'I thought that this beloved cross and these sacred relics would ever get into other hands—would ever touch other flesh—than mine, I should die a maniac, Hal, and my spirit would never be released from the chains of earth.' It was the superstitious tone of his talk that irritated and hardened me. He saw it, and a piteous expression overspread his features.

'Don't desert your poor father,' he said. 'What I want is the word of an Aylwin that those beloved relics shall be buried with me. If I had that, I should be content to live, and content to die. Oh, Hal!'

He threw such an imploring gaze into my face as he said 'Oh, Hal!' that, reluctant as I was to be mixed up with superstition, I promised to execute his wishes; I promised also to keep the secret from all the world during his life, and after his death to share it with those two only from whom, for family reasons, it could not be kept—my uncle Aylwin of Alvanley and my mother. He then put away the amulet, and his face resumed the look of placid content it usually wore. He was feeling the facets of the mysterious 'Moonlight Cross'!

The most marvellous thing is this, however: his old relations towards me were at once resumed. He never alluded to the subject of his first wife again, and I soon found it difficult to believe that the conversation just recorded ever took place at all. Evidently his monomania only rose up to a passionate expression when fanned into sudden flame by talking about the cross. It was as though the shock of his first wife's death had severed his consciousness and his life in twain.

II

Naturally this visit to Switzerland cemented our intimacy, and it was on our return home that he suggested my accompanying him on one of his 'rubbing expeditions.'

'Henry,' he said, 'your mother has of late frequently discussed with me the question of your future calling in life. She suggests a Parliamentary career. I confess that I find questions about careers exceedingly disturbing.'

'There is only one profession I should like, father,' I said, 'and that is a painter's.' In fact, the passion for painting had come on me very strongly of late. My dreams had from the first been of wandering with Winnie in a paradise of colour, and these dreams had of late been more frequent: the paradise of colour had been growing richer and rarer.

He shook his head gravely and said, 'No, my dear; your mother would never allow it.'

'Why not?' I said; 'is painting low too?'

'Cyril Aylwin is low, at least so your mother and aunt say, especially your aunt. I have not perceived it myself, but then your mother's perceptive faculties are extraordinary—quite extraordinary.'

'Did the lowness come from his being a painter, father?' I asked.

'Really, child, you are puzzling me. But I have observed you now for some weeks, and I quite believe that you would make one of the best rubbers who ever held a ball. I am going to Salisbury next week, and you shall then make your début.'

This was in the midst of a very severe winter we had some years ago, when all Europe was under a coating of ice.

'But, father,' I said, 'shan't we find it rather cold?'

'Well,' said my father, with a bland smile, 'I will not pretend that Salisbury Cathedral is particularly warm in this weather, but in winter I always rub in knee-caps and mittens. I will tell Hodder to knit you a full set at once.'

'But, father,' I said, 'Tom Wynne tells me that rubbing is the most painful of all occupations. He even goes so far sometimes as to say that it was the exhaustion of rubbing for you which turned him to drink.'

'Nothing of the kind,' said my father. 'All that Tom needed to make him a good rubber was enthusiasm. I am strongly of opinion that without enthusiasm rubbing is of all occupations the most irksome, except perhaps for the quadrumana (who seem more adapted for this exercise), the most painful for the spine, the most cramping for the thighs, the most numbing for the fingers. It is a profession, Henry, demanding, above every other, enthusiasm in the operator. Now Tom's enthusiasm for rubbing as an art was from the first exceedingly feeble.'

I was on the eve of revolting, but I remembered what there was lacerating his poor breast, and consented. And when I heard hints of our 'working the Welsh churches' my sudden enthusiasm for the rubber's art astonished even my father.

'My dear,' he said to my mother at dinner one day, 'what do you think? Henry has developed quite a sudden passion for rubbing.'

I saw an expression of perplexity and mystification overspread my mother's sagacious face.

'And in the spring,' continued my father, 'we are going into Wales to rub.'

'Into Wales, are you?' said my mother, in a tone of that soft voice whose meaning I knew so well.

My thoughts were continually upon Winifred, now that I was alone in the familiar spots. I had never seen her nor heard from her since we parted as children. She had only known me as a cripple. What would she think of me now? Did she ever think of me? She had not answered my childish letter, and this had caused me much sorrow and perplexity.

We did not go into Wales after all. But the result of this conversation took a shape that amazed me. I was sent to stay with my Aunt Prue in London in order that I might attend one of the Schools of Art. Yes, my mother thought it was better for me even to run the risk of becoming bohemianised like Cyril Aylwin, than to brood over Winnie or the scenes that were associated with our happy childhood.

In London I was an absolute stranger. We had no town house. On the few occasions when the family had gone to London, it was to stay in Belgrave Square with my Aunt Prue, who was an unmarried sister of my mother's.

'Since the death of the Prince Consort, to go no further back,' she used to say, 'a dreadful change has come over the tone of society; the love of bohemianism, the desire to take up any kind of people, if they are amusing, and still more if they are rich, is levelling everything. However, I'm nobody now; I say nothing.'

What wonder that from my very childhood my aunt took a prejudice against me, and predicted for me a career 'as deplorable as Cyril Aylwin's,' and sympathised with my mother in her terror of the Gypsy strain in my father's branch of the family?

Her tastes and instincts being intensely aristocratic, she suffered a martyrdom from her ever present consciousness of this disgrace. She had seen very much more of what is called Society than my mother had ever an opportunity of seeing. It was not, however, aristocracy, but Royalty that won the true worship of her soul.

Although she was immeasurably inferior to my mother in everything, her influence over her was great, and it was always for ill. I believe that even my mother's prejudice against Tom Wynne was largely owing to my aunt, who disliked my relations towards Wynne simply because he did not represent one of the great Wynne families. But the remarkable thing was that, although my mother thus yielded to my aunt's influence, she in her heart despised her sister's ignorance and her narrowness of mind. She often took a humorous pleasure in seeing my aunt's aristocratic proclivities baffled by some vexing contretemps or by some slight passed upon her by people of superior rank, especially by those in the Royal circle.

There have been so many descriptions of art schools, from the famous 'Gandish's' down to the very moment at which I write, that I do not intend to describe mine.

It would be very far from my taste to use a narrative like this, a narrative made sacred by the spiritual love it records, as a means of advertising efforts of such modest pretensions as mine when placed in comparison with the work of the illustrious painters my friendship with whom has been the great honour of my life. And if I allude here to the fact of my being a painter, it is in order that I may not be mistaken for another Aylwin. my cousin Percy, who in some unpublished poems of his which I have seen has told how a sailor was turned into a poet by love—love of Rhona Boswell. In the same way, these pages are written to tell how I was made a painter by love of her whom I first saw in Raxton churchyard, her who filled my being as Beatrice filled the being of Dante when 'the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of his body shook therewith.'

III

Time went by, and I returned to Raxton. Just when I had determined that, come what would, I would go into Wales, Wynne one day told me that Winnie was coming to live with him at Raxton, her aunt having lately died. 'The English lady,' said he, 'who lived with them so long and eddicated Winifred, has gone to live at Carnarvon to get the sea air.'

This news was at once a joy and a perplexity.

Wynne, though still the handsomest and finest man in Raxton, had sunk much lower in intemperance of late. He now generally wound up a conversation with me by a certain stereotyped allusion to the dryness of the weather, which I perfectly understood to mean that he felt thirsty, and that an offer of half-a-crown for beer would not be unacceptable. He was a proud man in everything except in reference to beer. But he seemed to think there was no degradation in asking for money to get drunk with, though to have asked for it to buy bread would, I suppose, have wounded his pride. I did not then see so clearly as I now do the wrong of giving him those half-crowns. His annuity he had long since sold.

Spite of all his delinquencies, however, my father liked him; so did my uncle Aylwin of Alvanley. But my mother seemed positively to hate him. It was the knowledge of this that caused my anxiety about Winifred's return. I felt that complications must arise.

At this time I used to go to Dullingham every day. The clergyman there was preparing me for college.

On the Sunday following the day when I got such momentous news from Wynne, I was met suddenly, as my mother and I were leaving the church after the service, by the gaze of a pair of blue eyes that arrested my steps as by magic, and caused the church and the churchgoers to vanish from my sight.

The picture of Winifred that had dwelt in my mind so long was that of a beautiful child. The radiant vision of the girl before me came on me by surprise and dazzled me. Tall and slim she was now, but the complexion had not altered at all; the eyes seemed young and childlike as ever.

When our eyes met she blushed, then turned pale, and took hold of the top of a seat near which she was standing. She came along the aisle close to us, gliding and slipping through the crowd, and passed out of the porch. My mother had seen my agitation, and had moved on in a state of haughty indignation. I had no room, however, at that moment for considerations of any person but one. I hurried out of the church, and, following Winifred, grasped her gloved hand.

'Winifred, you are come,' I said; 'I have been longing to see you.'

She again turned pale and then blushed scarlet. Next she looked down me as if she had expected to see something which she did not see, and when her eyes were upraised again something in them gave me a strange fancy that she was disappointed to miss my crutches.

'Why didn't you write to me from Wales, Winifred? Why didn't you answer my letter years ago?'

She hesitated, then said,

'My aunt wouldn't let me, sir.'

'Wouldn't let you answer it! and why?'

Again she hesitated—

'I—I don't know, sir.'

'You do know, Winifred. I see that you know, and you shall tell me.
Why didn't your aunt let you answer my letter?'

Winifred's eyes looked into mine beseechingly. Then that light of playful humour, which I remembered so well, shot like a sunbeam across and through them as she replied—

'My aunt said we must both forget our pretty dream.'

Almost before the words were out, however, the sunbeam fled from her eyes and was replaced by a look of terror. I now perceived that my mother, in passing to the carriage, had lingered on the gravel-path close to us, and had, of course, overheard the dialogue. She passed on with a look of hate. I thought it wise to bid Winifred good-bye and join my mother.

As I stepped into the carriage I turned round and saw that Winifred was again looking wistfully at some particular part of me—looking with exactly that simple, frank, 'objective' expression with which I was familiar.

'I knew it was the crutches she missed,' I said to myself as I sat down by my mother's side; 'she'll have to love me now because I am not lame.'

I also knew something else: I must prepare for a conflict with my mother. My father, at this time in Switzerland, had written to say that he had been suffering acutely from an attack of what he called 'spasms.' He had 'been much subject to them of late, but no one considered them to be really dangerous.'

During luncheon I felt that my mother's eyes were on me. After it was over she went to her room to write in answer to my father's letter, and then later on she returned to me.

'Henry,' she said, 'my overhearing the dialogue in the churchyard between you and Wynne's daughter was, I need not pay, quite accidental, but it is perhaps fortunate that I did overhear it.'

'Why fortunate, mother? You simply heard her say that her aunt in Wales had forbidden her to answer a childish letter of mine written years ago.'

'In telling you which, the girl, I must say, proclaimed her aunt to be an exceedingly sensible and well-conducted woman,' said my mother.

'On that point, mother,' I said, 'you must allow me to hold a different opinion. I, for my part, should have said that Winifred's story proclaimed her aunt to be a worthy member of a flunkey society like this of ours—a society whose structure, political and moral and religious, is based on an adamantine rock of paltry snobbery.'

It was impossible to restrain my indignation.

'I am aware, Henry,' replied my mother calmly, 'that it is one of the fashions of the hour for young men of family to adopt the language of Radical newspapers. In a country like this the affectation does no great harm, I grant, and my only serious objection to it is that it implies in young men of one's own class a lack of originality which is a little humiliating. I am aware that your cousin, Percy Aylwin, of Rington Manor, used to talk in the same strain as this, and ended by joining the Gypsies. But I came to warn you, Henry, I came to urge you not to injure this poor girl's reputation by such scenes as that I witnessed this morning.'

I remained silent. The method of my mother's attack had taken me by surprise. Her sagacity was so much greater than mine, her power of fence was so much greater, her stroke was so much deadlier, that in all our encounters I had been conquered.

'It is for the girl's own sake that I speak to you,' continued my mother. 'She was deeply embarrassed at your method of address, and well she might be, seeing that it will be, for a long time to come, the subject of discussion in all the beer-houses which her father frequents.'

'You speak as though she were answerable for her father's faults,' I said, with heat.

'No,' said my mother; 'but your father is the owner of Raxton Hall, which to her and her class is a kind of Palace of the Cæsars. You belong to a family famous all along the coast; you are well known to be the probable heir of one of the largest landowners in England; you may be something more important still; while she, poor girl, what is she that you should rush up to her before all the churchgoers of the parish and address her as Winifred? The daughter of a penniless, drunken reprobate. Every attention you pay her is but a slur upon her good name.'

'There is not a lady in the county worthy to unlace her shoes,' I cried, unguardedly. Then I could have bitten off my tongue for saying so.

'That may be,' said my mother, with the quiet irony peculiar to her; 'but so monstrous are the customs of England, Henry, so barbaric is this society you despise, that she, whose shoes no lady in the county is worthy to unlace, is in an anomalous position. Should she once again be seen talking familiarly with you, her character will have fled, and fled for ever. It is for you to choose whether you are set upon ruining her reputation.'

I felt that what she said was true. I felt also that Winifred herself had recognised the net of conventions that kept us apart in spite of that close and tender intimacy which had been the one great fact of our lives. In a certain sense I was far more of a child of Nature than Winifred herself, inasmuch as, owing to my remarkable childish experience of isolation, I had imbibed a scepticism about the sanctity of conventions such as is foreign to the nature of woman, be she ever so unsophisticated, as Winifred's shyness towards me had testified.

As a child I had been neglected for the firstborn, I had enjoyed through this neglect an absolute freedom with regard to associating with fisher-boys and all the shoeless, hatless 'sea-pups' of the sands, and now, when the time had come to civilise me, my mother had found that it was too late. I was bohemian to the core. My childish intercourse with Winifred had been one of absolute equality, and I could not now divest myself of this relation. These were my thoughts as I listened to my mother's words.

My great fear now, however, was lest I should say something to compromise myself, and so make matter worse. Before another word upon the subject should pass between my mother and me I must see Winifred—and then I had something to say to her which no power on earth should prevent me from saying. So I merely told my mother that there was much truth in what she had said, and proceeded to ask particulars about my father's recent illness. After giving me these particulars she left the room, perplexed, I thought, as to what had been the result of her mission.

IV

I remained alone for some time. Then I told the servants that I was going to walk along the cliffs to Dullingham Church, where there was an evening service, and left the house. I hastened towards the cliffs, and descended to the sands, in the hope that Winifred might be roaming about there, but I walked all the way to Dullingham without getting a glimpse of her. The church service did not interest me that evening. I heard nothing and saw nothing. When the service was over I returned along the sands, sauntering and lingering in the hope that, late as it was now growing, the balmy evening might have enticed her out.

The evening grew to night, and still I lingered. The moon was nearly at the full, and exceedingly bright. The tide was down. The scene was magical; I could not leave it. I said to myself, 'I will go and stand on the very spot where Winifred stood when she lisped "certumly" to the proposal of her little lover.'

It was not, after all, till this evening that I really knew how entirely she was a portion of my life.

I went and stood by the black boulder where I had received the little child's prompt reply. There was not a grain left, I knew, of that same sand which had been hallowed by the little feet of Winifred, but it served my mood just as well as though every grain had felt the beloved pressure. For that the very sands had loved the child, I half believed.

I said to myself, as I sat down upon the boulder, 'At this very moment she is here, she is in Raxton. In a certain little cottage there is a certain little room.' And then I longed to leave the sands, to go and stand in front of Wynne's cottage and dream there. But that would be too foolish. 'I must get home,' I thought. 'The night will pass somehow, and in the morning I shall, as sure as fate, see her flitting about the sands she loves, and then what I have sworn to say to her I will say, and what I have sworn to do I will do, come what will.'

Then came the puzzling question, how was I to greet her when we met? Was I to run up and kiss her, and hear her say, 'Oh, I'm so pleased!' as she would sometimes say when I kissed her of yore? No: her deportment in the morning forbade that. Or was I to raise my hat and walk up to her saying, 'How do you do, Miss Wynne? I'm glad to see you back, Miss Wynne,' for she was now neither child nor young woman, she was a 'girl.' Perhaps I had better rush up to her in a bluff, hearty way, and say: 'How do you do, Miss Winifred? Delighted to see you back to Raxton.' Finally, I decided that circumstance must guide me entirely, and I sat upon the boulder meditating.

After a while I saw, or thought I saw, in the far distance, close to the waves, a moving figure among the patches of rocks and stones (some black and some white) that break the continuity of the sand on that shore at low water.

When the figure got nearer I perceived it to be a woman, a girl, who, every now and then, was stooping as if to pick up something from the pools of water left by the ebbing tide imprisoned amid the encircling rocks. At first I watched the figure, wondering in a lazy and dreamy way what girl could be out there so late.

But all at once I began to catch my breath and gasp The sea-smells had become laden with a kind of paradisal perfume, ineffably sweet, but difficult to breathe all of a sudden. My heart too—what was amiss with that? And why did the muscles of my body seem to melt like wax?' The lonely wanderer by the sea could be none other than Winifred.

'It is she!' I said. 'There is no beach-woman or shore-prowling girl who, without raising an arm to balance her body, without a totter or a slip, could step in that way upon stones some of which are as slippery as ice with gelatinous weed and slime, while others are as sharp as razors. To walk like that the eye must be my darling's, that is to say, an eye as sure as a bird's the ball of the foot must be the ball of a certain little foot I have often had in my hand wet with sea-water and gritty with sand. For such work a mountaineer or a cragsman, or Winifred, is needed.' Then I recalled her love of marine creatures, her delight in seaweed, of which she would weave the most astonishing chaplets and necklaces coloured like the rainbow. 'seawood boas' and seaweed turbans, calling herself the princess of the sea (as indeed she was), and calling me her prince. 'Yes,' said I, 'it is certainly she'; and when at last I espied a little dog by her side, Tom Wynne's little dog Snap (a descendant of the original Snap of our never-to-be-forgotten seaside adventures)—when I espied all these things I said, 'Then the hour is come.'

By this time my heart had settled down to a calmer throb, the paradisal scent had become more supportable, and I grew master of myself again. I was going towards her, when I stayed my steps, for she was already making her way, entirely unconscious of my presence, towards the boulder where I sat.

'I know what I will do.' I said; 'I will fling myself flat on the sands behind the boulder and watch her. I will observe her without being myself observed.'

I was in the mood when one tries sportfully to deceive one's self as to the depth and intensity of the emotion within. Perhaps I would and perhaps I would not speak to her at all that night; but if I did speak, I would say and do what (on that day when I set out for school) I had sworn to say and do.

So there I lay hidden by the boulder and watched her. She made the circuit of each pool that lay across her path towards the cliffs,—made it apparently for the childish enjoyment of balancing herself on the stones and snapping her fingers at the dog, who looked on with philosophic indifference at such a frivolous waste of force. Yes, though a tall girl of seventeen, she was the same incomparable child who had coloured my life and stirred the entire air of my imagination with the breezes of a new heaven. The voice of the tumbling sea in the distance, the caresses of the tender breeze, the wistful gaze of the great moon overhead, were companionship enough for her—for her whose loveliness would have enchanted a world. She had no idea that there was at this moment stepping round those black stones the loveliest woman then upon the earth. If she had had that idea she would still have been the star of all womanhood, but she would not have been Winifred. A charm superior to all other women's charm she still would have had; but she would not have been Winifred.

When she left the rocks and came upon the clear sand, she stopped and looked at her sweet shadow in the moonlight. Then, with the self-pleasing playfulness of a kitten, she stood and put herself into all kinds of postures to see what varying silhouettes they would make on the hard and polished sand (that shone with a soft lustre like satin); now throwing up one arm, now another, and at last making a pirouette, twirling her shawl round, trying to keep it in a horizontal position by the rapidity of her movements.

The interest of the philosophic Snap was aroused at last. He began wheeling and barking round her, tearing up the sand as he went like a little whirlwind. This induced Winifred to redouble her gymnastic exertions. She twirled round with the velocity of an engine wheel. At last, finding the enjoyment it gave to Snap, she changed the performance by taking off her hat, flinging it high in the air, catching it, flinging it up again and again, while the moving shadow it made was hunted along the sand by Snap with a volley of deafening barks. By this time she had got close to me, but she was too busy to see me. Then she began to dance—the very same dance with which she used to entertain me in those happy days. I advanced from my stone, dodging and slipping behind her, unobserved even by Snap, so intent were these two friends upon this entertainment, got up, one would think, for whatsoever sylphs or gnomes or water sprites might be looking on.

How could I address in the language of passion which alone would have expressed my true feelings, a dancing fairy such as this?

'Bravo!' I said, as she stopped, panting and breathless. 'Why,
Winifred, you dance better than ever!'

She leaped away in alarm and confusion; while Snap, on the contrary, welcomed me with much joy.

'Oh, I beg your pardon, sir,' she said, not looking at me with the blunt frankness of childhood, as the little woman of the old days used to do, but drooping her eyes. 'I didn't see you.'

'But I saw you, Winifred; I have been watching you for the last quarter of an hour.'

'Oh, you never have!' said she, in distress; 'what could you have thought? I was only trying to cheer up poor Snap, who is out of sorts. What a mad romp you must have thought me, sir!'

'Why, what's the matter with Snap?'

'I don't know. Poor Snap' (stooping down to fondle him, and at the same time to hide her face from me, for she was talking against time to conceal her great confusion and agitation at seeing me. That was perceptible enough.)

Then she remembered she was hatless.

'Oh dear, where's my hat?' said she, looking round. I had picked up the hat before accosting her, and it was now dangling behind me. I, too, began talking against time, for the beating of my heart began again at the thought of what I was going to say and do. 'Hat!' I said; 'do you wear hats, Winifred? I should as soon have thought of hearing the Queen of the Tylwyth Teg ask for her hat as you, after such goings-on as those I have just been witnessing. You see I have not forgotten the Welsh you taught me.'

'Oh, but my hat—where is it?' cried she, vexed and sorely ashamed. So different from the unblenching child who loved to stand hatless and feel the rain-drops on her bare head!

'Well, Winifred, I've found a hat on the sand,' I said; 'here it is.'

'Thank you, sir,' said she, and stretched out her hand for it.

'No,' said I, 'I don't for one moment believe in its belonging to you, any more than it belongs to the Queen of the "Fair People." But if you'll let me put it on your head I'll give you the hat I've found,' and with a rapid movement I advanced and put it on her head. I had meant to seize that moment for saying what I had to say, but was obliged to wait.

An expression of such genuine distress overspread her face, that I regretted having taken the liberty with her. Her bearing altogether was puzzling me. She seemed instinctively to feel as I felt, that raillery was the only possible attitude to take up in a situation so extremely romantic—a meeting on the sands at night between me and her who was neither child nor woman—and yet she seemed distressed at the raillery.

Embarrassment was rapidly coming between us.

There was a brief silence, during which Winifred seemed trying to move away from me.

'Did you—did you see me from the cliffs, sir, am; come down?' said
Winifred.

'Winifred,' said I, 'the polite thing to say would be "Yes"; but you know "Fighting Hal" never was remarkable for politeness, so I will say frankly that did not come down from the cliff's on seeing you. But when I did see you, I wasn't very likely to return without speaking to you.'

'I am locked out,' said Winifred, in explanation of her moonlight ramble. 'My father went off to Dullingham with the key in his pocket while I and Snap were in the garden, so we have to wait till his return. Good-night, sir,' and she gave me her hand. I seemed to feel the fingers around my heart, and knew that I was turning very pale. 'The same little sunburnt fingers.' I said, as I retained them in mine 'just the same, Winifred! But it's not "good-night" yet. No, no, it's not good-night yet; and, Winifred if you dare to call me "sir" again, I declare I'll kiss you where you stand. I will, Winifred. I'll put my arms right round that slender waist and kiss you under that moon, as sure as you stand on these sands.'

'Then I will not call you "sir."' said Winifred laughingly.
'Certainly I will not call you "sir," if that is to be the penalty.'

'Winifred,' said I, 'the last time that I remember to have heard you say "certainly" was on this very spot. You then pronounced it "certumly," and that was when I asked you if I might be your lover. You said "certumly" on that occasion without the least hesitation.'

Winifred, as I could see, even by the moonlight, was blushing. 'Ah, those childish days!' she said. 'How delightful they were, sir!'

'"Sir" again!' said I. 'Now, Winifred, I am going to execute my threat—I am indeed.'

She put up her hands before her face and said,

'Oh, don't! please don't.'

The action no doubt might seem coquettish, but the tone of her voice was so genuine, so serious—so agitated even—that I paused:—I paused in bewilderment and perplexity concerning us both. I observed that her fingers shook as she held them before her face. That she should be agitated at seeing me after so long a separation did not surprise me, I being deeply agitated myself. It was the nature of her emotion that puzzled me, until suddenly I remembered my mother's words.

I perceived then that, child of Nature as she still was, some one had given her a careful training which had transfigured my little Welsh rustic into a lady. She had not failed to apprehend the anomaly of her present position—on the moonlit sands with me. Though could not break free from the old equal relations between us. Winifred had been able to do so.

'To her,' I thought with shame, 'my offering to kiss her at such a place and time must have seemed an insult. The very fact of my attempting to do so must have seemed to indicate an offensive consciousness of the difference of our social positions. It must have, seemed to show that I recognised a distinction between the drunken organist's daughter and a lady.'

I saw now, indeed, that she felt this keenly; and I knew that it was nothing but the sweetness of her nature, coupled with the fond recollection of the old happy days, that restrained that high spirit of hers, and prevented her from giving expression to her indignation and disgust.

All this was shown by the appealing look on her sweet, fond face, and
I was touched to the heart.

'Winifred—Miss Wynne,' I said, 'I beg your pardon most sincerely. The shadow-dance has been mainly answerable for my folly. You did look so exactly the little Winifred, my heart's sister, that I felt it impossible to treat you otherwise than as that dear child-friend of years ago.'

A look of delight broke over her face.

'I felt sure it was so,' she said. 'But it is a relief that you have said it.' And the tears came to her eyes.

'Thank you, Winifred, for having pardoned me. I feel that you would have forgiven no one else as you have forgiven me. I feel that you would not have forgiven any one else than your old child-companion, whom on a memorable occasion you threatened to hit, and then had not the heart to do so.'

'I don't think I could hit you,' said she, in a meditative tone of perfect unconsciousness as to the bewitching import of her speech.

'Don't you think you could?' I said, drawing nearer, but governing my passion.

'No,' said she, looking now for the first time with those wide-open confiding eyes which, as a child, were the chief characteristic of her face. 'I don't think I could hit you, whatever you did.'

'Couldn't you, Winifred?' I said, coming still nearer, in order to drink to the full the wonder of her beauty, the thrill at my heart bringing, as I felt, a pallor to my cheek. 'Don't you think you could hit your old playfellow, Winifred?'

'No,' she said, still gazing in the same dreamy, reminiscent way straight into my eyes as of yore. 'As a child you were so delightful. And then you were so kind to me!'

At that word 'kind' from her to me I could restrain myself no longer; I shouted with a wild laughter of uncontrollable passion as I gazed at her through tears of love and admiration and deep gratitude—gazed till I was blind. My throat throbbed till it ached: I Could get out no more words; I could only gaze. At my shout Winifred stood bewildered and confused. She did not understand a mood like that. Having got myself under control, I said,

'Winifred, it is not my doing; it is Fate's doing that we meet here on this night, and that I am driven to say here what I had as a schoolboy sworn should be said whenever we should meet again.'

'I think,' said Winifred, pulling herself up with the dignity of a queen, 'that if you have anything important to say to me it had better be at a more seasonable time than at this hour of night, and at a more seasonable place than on these sands.'

'No, Winifred,' said I, 'the time is now, and the place is here—here on this very spot where, once on a time, you said "certumly" when a little lover asked your hand. It is now and here, Winifred, that I will say what I have to say.'

'And what is that, sir?' said Winifred, much perplexed and disturbed.

'I have to say, Winifred, that the man does not live and never has lived,' said I, with suppressed vehemence, who loved a woman as I love you.'

Oh, sir! oh, Henry!' returned Winifred, trembling, then standing still and whiter than the moon. 'And the reason why no man has ever loved a woman as I love you, Winifred, is because your match, or anything like your match, has never trod the earth before.'

'Oh, Henry, my dear Henry! you must not say such things to me, your poor Winifred.'

'But that isn't all that I swore I'd say to you, Winifred.'

'Don't say any more—not to-night, not to-night.'

'What I swore I would ask you, Winifred, is this: Will you be Henry's wife?'

She gave one hysterical sob, and swayed till she nearly fell on the sand, and said, while her face shone like a pearl,

'Henry's wife!'

She recovered herself and stood and looked at me; her lips moved, but I waited in vain—waited in a fever of expectation—for her answer. None came. I gazed into her eyes, but they now seemed rilled with visions—visions of the great race to which she belonged—visions in which her English lover had no place. Suddenly, and for the first time, I felt that she who had inspired within me this all-conquering passion, though the penniless child of a drunken organist, was a daughter of Snowdon—a representative of the Cymric race that was once so mighty, and is still more romantic in its associations than all others. Already in the little talk I had had with her I began to guess what I realised before the evening was over, that owing to the influence of the English lady, Miss Dalrymple, who had lodged at the cottage with her, she was more than my own equal in culture, and could have held her own with almost any girl of her own age in England. It was only in her subjection to Cymric superstitions that she was benighted.

'Winnie,' I murmured, 'what have you to say?'

After a while her eyes seemed to clear of the visions, and she said,

'What changes have come upon us both, Henry. since that childish betrothal on the sands!'

'Happy changes for one of the child-lovers,' I said—'happy changes for the one who was then a lonely cripple shut out from all sympathy save that which the other child-lover could give.'

'And yet you then seemed happy, Henry—happy with Winnie to help you up the gangways. And how happy Winnie was! But now the child-lover is a cripple no longer: he is very, very strong—he is so strong that he could carry Winnie up the gangways in his arms, I think.'

The thrill of natural pride which such recognition of my physical powers would otherwise have given me was quelled by a something in the tone in which she spoke.

'And he is powerful in every way,' she went on, as if talking to herself. 'He is a great rich Englishman to whom (as auntie was never tired of saying) that childish betrothal must needs seem a dream—a quaint and pretty dream.'

'And so your aunt said that, Winnie. How far from the truth she was you see to-night.'

'Yes, she thought you would forget all about me; and yet she could not have felt quite confident about it, for she made me promise that if you should not forget me—if you should ever ask me what you have just asked—she made me promise—'

'What, Winnie? what? She did not make promise that you would refuse me?'

'That is what she asked me to promise.'

'But you did not.'

'I did not.'

'No, no! you did not, Winnie. My darling refused to make any such cruel, monstrous promise as that.'

'But I promised her that I would in such an event wait a year—at least a year—before betrothing myself to you.'

'Shame! shame! What made her do this cruel thing? A year! wait for a year!'

'She brought forward many reasons, Henry, but upon two of them she was constantly dwelling.'

'And what were these?'

'Well, the news of the death of your brother Frank of course reached us in Shire-Carnarvon, and how well I remember hearing my aunt say, "Henry Aylwin will be one of the wealthiest landowners in England." And I remember how my heart sank at her words, for I was always thinking of the dear little lame boy with the language of suffering in his eyes and the deep music of sorrow in his voice.'

'Your heart sank, Winnie, and why?'

'I felt as if a breath of icy air had blown between us, dividing us for ever. And then my aunt began to talk about you and your future.'

After some trouble I persuaded Winnie to tell me what was the homily that this aunt of hers preached à propos of Frank's death. And as she talked I could not help observing what, as a child, I had only observed in a dim, semi-conscious way—a strange kind of double personality in Winnie. At one moment she seemed to me nothing but the dancing fairy of the sands, objective and unconscious as a young animal playing to itself, at another she seemed the mouthpiece of the narrow world-wisdom of this Welsh aunt. No sooner had she spoken of herself as a friendless, homeless girl, than her brow began to shine with the pride of the Cymry.

'My aunt,' said she, 'used to tell me that until disaster came upon my uncle, and they were reduced to living upon a very narrow income, he and she never really knew what love was—they never really knew how rich their hearts were in the capacity of loving.'

'Ah, I thought so,' I said bitterly. 'I thought the text was,

Love in a hut, with water and a crust.'

'No,' said Winifred firmly, 'that was not the text. She believed that the wolf must not be very close to the door behind which love is nestling.'

'Then what did she believe? In the name of common-sense, Winnie, what did she believe?'

'She believed,' said Winnie, her cheek flushing and her eyes brightening as she went on, 'that of all the schemes devised by man's evil genius to spoil his nature, to make him self-indulgent, and luxurious, and tyrannical, and incapable of understanding what the word "love" means, the scheme of showering great wealth upon him is the most perfect.'

'Ah, yes, yes; the old nonsense. Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of love. And in what way did she enlarge upon this most charitable theme?'

'She told me dreadful things about the demoralising power of riches in our time.'

'Dreadful things! What were they, Winnie?'

'She told me how insatiable is the greed for pleasure at this time. She told me that the passion of vanity—"the greatest of all the human passions," as she used to say—has taken the form of money-worship in our time, sapping all the noblest instincts of men and women, and in rich people poisoning even parental affection, making the mother thirst for the pleasures which in old days she would only have tried to win for her child. She told me stories—dreadful stories—about children with expectations of great wealth who watched the poor grey hairs of those who gave them birth, and counted the years and months and days that kept them from the gold which modern society finds to be more precious than honour, family, heroism, genius, and all that was held precious in less materialised times. She told me a thousand other things of this kind, and when I grew older she put into my hand what has been written on the subject.'

'Good God! Has the narrow-minded tomfoolery got a literature?'

Winnie went on with her eloquent account of her aunt's doctrines, and to my surprise I found that there actually was a literature of the subject.

Winnie's bright eyes had actually pored over old and long Chartist tracts translated into Welsh, and books on the Christian Socialism of Charles Kingsley, and pamphlets on more' recent kinds of Socialism.

As she went on I could not help murmuring now and then, 'What surroundings for my Winnie!'

'And the result of all this was, Winnie, that your aunt asked you to promise not to marry a man demoralised by privileges and made contemptible by wealth.'

'That is what she wanted me to promise; but as I have said, I did not. But I did promise to wait for a year and see what effect wealth would have upon you.'

'Did your aunt not tell you also that the man who marries you can never be unmanned by wealth, because he will know that everything he can give is as dross when set against Winnie's love and Winnie's beauty: Did she not also tell you that?'

'Love and beauty!' said Winnie. 'Even if a woman's beauty did not depend for its existence upon the eyes that look upon it, I should want to give more to my hero than love and beauty. I should want to give him help in the battle of life, Henry. I should want to buckle on his armour, and sharpen the point of his lance, and whet the edge of his sword; a rich man's armour is bank-notes, and Winnie knows nothing of such paper. His spear, I am told, is a bullion bar, and Winnie's fingers scarcely know the touch of gold.'

'Then you agree, Winnie, with these strange views of your aunt?'

'I do partly agree with them now. Ever since I saw you to-day in the churchyard I have partly agreed with them.'

'And why?'

'Because already prosperity or bodily vigour or something has changed your eyes and changed the tone of your voice.'

'You mean that my eyes are no longer so full of trouble; and as to my voice—how should my voice not change, seeing that it was the voice of a child when you last listened to it?'

'It is impossible for me even now, after I have thought about it so much, to put into words that expression in your eyes which won me as a child. All I knew at the time was that it fascinated me. And as I now recall it, all I know is that your gaze then seemed full of something which I can give a name to now, though I did not understand it then—the pathos and tenderness and yearning, which come, as I have been told, from suffering, and that your voice seemed to have the same message. That expression and that tone are gone—they will, of course, never return to you now. Your life is, and will be, too prosperous for that. But still I hope and believe that in a year's time prosperity will not have worked in you any of the mischief that my aunt feared. For you have a noble nature, Henry, and to spoil you will not be easy. You will never be the dear little Henry I loved, but you will still be nobler and greater than other men, I think.'

'Do you really mean that my lameness was a positive attraction to you? Do you really mean that the very change in me which I thought would strengthen the bond between us—my restoration to health—weakens it? That is impossible, Winnie.'

She remained silent for a time, as though lost in thought, and then said, 'I do not believe that any woman can understand the movements of her own heart where love is concerned. My aunt used to say I was a strange girl, and I am afraid I am strange and perverse. She used to say that in my affections I was like no other creature in the world.'

'How should Winifred be like any other creature in the world?' I said. 'She would not be Winifred if she were. But what did your aunt mean?'

'When I was quite a little child she noticed that I was neglecting a favourite mavis which I used to delight to listen to as he warbled from his wicker cage. She watched me, and found that my attention was all given to a wounded bird that I had picked up on the Capel Curig road. "Winnie," she said, "nothing can ever win your love until it has first won your pity. A bird with a broken wing would be always more to you than a sound one!"'

'Your aunt was right,' I said, 'as no one should know better than I. For was it not the new kind of pity shining in those eyes of yours that revealed to me a new heaven in my loneliness? And when my brother Frank on that day in the wood stood over us in all the pride of his boyish strength, do I not remember the words you spoke?'

'What were they? I have quite forgotten them.'

'You said, "I don't think I could love any one very much who was not lame."'

V

I wonder what words could render that love-dream on the dear silvered sands, with the moon overhead, the dark shadowy cliffs and the old church on one side, and the North Sea murmuring a love-chime on the other!

Suffice it to record that Winifred, with a throb in her throat (a throb that prevented her from pronouncing her n's with the clarity that some might have desired), said 'certumly' again to Henry's suit,—'Certumly, if in a year's time you seek me out in the mountains, and your eyes and voice show that prosperity has not spoiled you, but that you are indeed my Henry.' And this being settled in strict accordance with her aunt's injunctions, she never tried to disguise how happy she was, but told Henry again and again in answer to his importunate questions—told him with her frank courage how she had loved him from the first in the old churchyard as a child—loved him for what she called his love-eyes; told him—ah! what did she not tell him? I must not go on. These things should not be written about at all but for the demands of my story.

And how soon she forgot that the betrothal was all on one side! I could write out every word of that talk. I remember every accent of her voice, every variation of light that came and went in her eyes, every ripple of love-laughter, every movement of her body, lissome as a greyhound's, graceful as a bird's. For fully an hour it lasted. And remember, reader, that it was on the silvered sands, every inch of which was associated with some reminiscence of childhood; it was beneath a moon smiling as fondly and brightly as she ever smiled on the domes of Venice or between the trees of Fiesole; it was by the margin of waves whose murmurs were soft and perfumed as Winifred's own breathing's when she slept; and remember that the girl was Winifred herself, and that the boy—the happy boy—had Winifred's love. Ah! but that last element of that hour's bliss is just what the reader cannot realise, because he can only know Winifred through these poor words. That is the distressing side of a task like mine. The beloved woman here called Winifred (no phantom of an idle imagination, but more real to me and dear to me than this soul and body I call my own)—this Winifred can only live for you, reader, through my feeble, faltering words; and yet I ask you to listen to the story of such a love as mine.

'Winnie,' I said, 'you have often as a child sung songs of Snowdon to me and told me of others you used to sing. I should love to hear one of these now, with the chime of the North Sea for an accompaniment instead of the instrument you tell me your Gypsy friend used to play. Before we go up the gangway, do sing me a verse of one of those songs.'

After some little persuasion she yielded and sang in a soft undertone the following verse:—

'I met in a glade a lone little maid,
At the foot of y Wyddfa the white;
Oh, lissom her feet as the mountain hind,
And darker her hair than the night;
Her cheek was like the mountain rose,
But fairer far to see,
As driving along her sheep with a song,
Down from the hills came she.'

[Welsh translation]

'Mi gwrddais gynt a morwynig,
Wrth odreu y Wyddfa wen,
Un ysgafn ei throed fel yr ewig
A gwallt fel y nos ar ei phen;
Ei grudd oedd fel y rhosyn,
Un hardd a gwen ei gwawr;
Yn canu cân, a'i defaid mân,
O'r Wyddfa'n d'od i lawr.'

'What a beautiful world it is!' said she, in a half-whisper, as we were about to part at the cottage door, for I had refused to leave her on the sands or even at the garden-gate. 'I should like to live for ever,' she whispered; 'shouldn't you, Henry?'

'Well, that all depends upon the person I lived with. For instance, I shouldn't care to live for ever with Widow Shales, the pale-faced tailoress, nor yet with her humpbacked son, whose hump was such a constant source of wistful wonder and solicitude to you as a child.'

She gave a merry little laugh of reminiscence. Then she said, 'But you could live with me for ever, couldn't you, Henry?' plucking a leaf from the grape-vine on the wall and putting it between her teeth.

'For ever and ever, Winifred.'

'It fills me with wonder,' said she, after a while, 'the thought of being Henry's wife. It is so delightful and yet so fearful.'

By this I knew she had not forgotten that look of hate on my mother's face.

She put her hand on the latch and found that the door was now unlocked.

'But where is the fearful part of it, Winifred?' I said. 'I am not a cannibal.'

'You ought to marry a great English lady, dear, and I'm only a poor girl; you seem to forget all about that, you silly fond boy. You forget I'm only a poor girl—just Winifred,' she continued.

'Just Winifred,' I said, taking her hand and preventing her from lifting the latch.

'I've lived,' said she, 'in a little cottage like this with my aunt and Miss Dalrymple and done everything.'

'Everything's a big word, Winifred. What may everything include in your case?'

'Include!' said Winifred; 'oh, everything, housekeeping and—'

'Housekeeping!' said I. 'Racing the winds with Rhona Boswell and other Gypsy children up and down Snowdon—that's been your housekeeping.'

'Cooking,' said Winifred, maintaining her point.

'Oh, what a fib, Winifred! These sunburnt fingers may have picked wild fruits, but they never made a pie in their lives.'

'Never made a pie! I make beautiful pies and things; and when we're married I'll make your pies—may I, instead of a conceited man-cook?'

'No, Winifred. Never make a pie or do a bit of cooking in my house,
I charge you.'

'Oh, why not?' said Winifred, a shade of disappointment overspreading her face. 'I suppose it's unladylike to cook.'

'Because,' said I,'once let me taste something made by these tanned fingers, and how could I ever afterwards eat anything made by a man-cook, conceited or modest? I should say to that poor cook, "Where is the Winifred flavour, cook? I don't taste those tanned fingers here." And then, suppose you were to die first, Winifred, why I should have to starve, just for want of a little Winifred flavour in the pie-crust. Now I don't want to starve, and you sha'n't cook.'

'Oh, Hal, you dear, dear fellow!' shrieked Winifred, in an ecstasy of delight at this nonsense. Then her deep love overpowered her quite, and she said, her eyes suffused with tears, 'Henry, you can't think how I love you. I'm sure I couldn't live even in heaven without you.'

Then came the shadow of a lich-owl, as it whisked past us towards the apple-trees.

'Why, you'd be obliged to live without me, Winifred, if I were still at Raxton.'

'No,' said she, 'I'm quite sure I couldn't. I should have to come in the winds and play round you on the sands. I should have to peep over the clouds and watch you. I should have to follow you about wherever you went. I should have to beset you till you said, "Bother Winnie! I wish she'd keep in heaven."'

I saw, however, that the owl's shadow had disturbed her, and I lifted the latch of the cottage door for her. We were met by a noise so loud that it might have come from a trombone.

'Why, what on earth is that?' I said. I could see the look of shame break over Winifred's features as she said, 'Father.' Yes, it was the snoring of Wynne in a drunken sleep: it filled the entire cottage.

The poor girl seemed to feel that that brutal noise had, somehow, coarsened her, and she actually half shrank from me as I gave her a kiss and left her.

Wondering how I should at such an hour get into the house without disturbing my mother and the servants, I passed along that same road where, as a crippled child, I had hobbled on that, bright afternoon when love was first revealed to me. Ah, what a different love was this which was firing my blood, and making dizzy my brain! That child-love had softened my heart in its deep distress, and widened my soul. This new and mighty passion in whose grasp I was, this irresistible power that had seized and possessed my entire being, wrought my soul in quite a different sort, concentrating and narrowing my horizon till the human life outside the circle of our love seemed far, far away, as though I were gazing through the wrong end of a telescope. I had learned that he who truly loves is indeed born again, becomes a new and a different man. Was it only a few short hours ago, I asked myself, that I was listening to my mother's attack upon Winifred? Was it this very evening that I was sitting in Dullingham Church?

How far away in the past seemed those events! And as to my mother's anger against Winifred, that anger and cruel scorn of class which had concerned me so much, how insignificant now seemed this and every other obstacle in love's path! I looked up at the moonlit sky; I leaned upon a gate and looked across the silent fields where Winifred and I used to gather violets in spring, hedge-roses in summer, mushrooms in autumn, and I said, 'I will marry her; she shall be mine; she shall be mine, though all the powers on earth, all the powers in the universe, should say nay.'

As I spoke I saw that lights were flashing to and fro in the windows of the Hall. 'My poor father is dead,' I said. I turned and ran up the road. 'Oh, that I could have seen him once again!' At the hall door I was met by a servant, and learnt that, while I had been love-making on the sands, a message had come from the Continent with news of my father's death.

VI

There was no meeting Winifred on the next night.

It was decided that my uncle's private secretary should go to Switzerland to bring the body to England. I (remembering my promise about the mementos) insisted on accompanying him. We started on the morrow, preceded by a message to my father's Swiss friends ordering an embalmment. Before starting I tried to see Winifred; but she had gone to Dullingham.

On our arrival at the little Swiss town, we found that the embalmment had been begun. The body was still in the hands of a famous embalmer—an Italian Jew settled at Geneva, the only successful rival there of Professor Laskowski. He was celebrated for having revived the old Hebraic method of embalmment in spices, and improving it by the aid of the modern discoveries in antiseptics of Laskowski, Signer Franchina of Naples, and Dr. Dupré of Paris. This physician told me that by his process the body would, without the peculiarly-sealed coffin used by the Swiss embalmers, last 'firm and white as Carrara marble for a thousand years.'

The people at the chalet had naturally been much astonished to find upon my father's breast a jewelled cross lying. As soon as I entered the house they handed it to me.

For some reason or another this amulet and the curse had haunted my imagination as much as if I believed in amulets and curses, though my reason told me that everything of the kind was sheer nonsense. I could not sleep for thinking about it, and in the night I rose from my bed, and, opening the window, held up the cross in the moonlight. The facets caught the silvery rays and focussed them. The amulet seemed to shudder with some prophecy of woe. It was now that, for the first time, I began to feel the signs of that great struggle between reason and the inherited instinct of superstition which afterwards played so important a part in my life. I then took up the parchment scroll, and opened it and re-read the curse. The great letters in which the English version was printed seemed to me larger by the light of the moon than they had seemed by daylight.

We had to wait for some time in Switzerland. In a locked drawer I found the casket and a copy of The Veiled Queen. I read much in the book. Every word I found there was in flat contradiction to my own mode of thought.

Did the shock of this dreadful catastrophe drive Winifred from my mind? No, nothing could have done that. My soul seemed, as I have said, to be new-born, and all emotions, passions, and sentiments that were not connected with her seemed to be shadowy and distant, like ante-natal dreams. It would be hypocrisy not to confess this frankly, regardless of the impression against me it may make on the reader's mind. Yet I had a real affection for my father. In spite of his extraordinary obliviousness of my very existence till the last year of his life, I was strongly attached to him, and his death made me see nothing but his virtues; yet my soul was so filled with my passion for Winifred as to have but little room for sorrow. As to my mother, her attachment to my father knew no bounds, and her grief at her bereavement knew none.

A day or two before the funeral my uncle Aylwin of Alvanley arrived, and his presence was a great comfort to her. Owing to my father's position in the county a great deal of funereal state was considered necessary, and there was much hurry and bustle.

My uncle having known Wynne when quite a young man, before intemperance had degraded him, took an interest in him still. He had called at the cottage as he passed along Wilderness Road towards Raxton, and the result of this was that the organist came to speak to him at our house upon some matter in connection with the funeral service. My mother was greatly vexed at this. Her conduct on the occasion alarmed me. Ever since Frank's death had made it evident not only that I should succeed to all the property of my uncle Aylwin of Alvanley, but that I might even succeed to something greater, to the earldom which was the glory and pride of the Aylwins, my mother had kept a jealous and watchful eye upon me, being, as I afterwards learned, not unmindful of the early child-loves of Winifred and myself; and the advent to Raxton of Winifred, as a beautiful tall girl, had aroused her fears as well as her wrath.

The day of the funeral came, and the question of the casket and the amulet was on my mind. The important thing, of course, was that the matter should be kept absolutely secret. The valuables must be placed in secrecy with the embalmed corpse at the last moment, before the screwing down of the coffin, when servants and undertakers were out of sight and hearing.

My mother knew what had been my father's instructions to me, and was desirous that they should be fulfilled, though she scorned the superstition. She and I placed the casket and the scroll hearing the written curse upon it beneath my father's head, and hung the chain of the amulet around his neck, so that the cross lay with the jewels uppermost upon his breast. Then the undertakers were called in to screw down the coffin in my presence. My mother afterwards called me to her room, and told me that she was much troubled about the cross. The amulet being of great value, my uncle Aylwin of Alvanley had tried to dissuade her from carrying into execution what he called 'the absurd whim of a mystic'; but my mother urged my promise, and there had been warm words between them, as my mother told me—adding, however, 'and the worst of it is, that scamp Wynne, whom your uncle introduced into this house without my knowledge or sanction, was passing the door while your uncle was talking, and if he did not hear every word about the jewelled cross, drink must have stupefied him indeed. He is my only fear in connection with the jewels.' Her dislike of Wynne had made her forget for the moment the effect her words must have upon me.

'Mother,' I said, 'your persistent prejudice and injustice towards this man astonish me. Wynne, though poor and degraded now, is a gentleman born, and is no more likely to violate a tomb than the best Aylwin that ever lived.'

I will not dwell upon the scene at the funeral. I saw my father's coffin placed in the crypt that spread beneath the deserted church. It was by the earnest wish of my father that he was buried in a church already deserted because the grip of the resistless sea was upon it. At this very time a very large slice of the cliff behind the church was pronounced dangerous, and I perceived that new rails were lying on the grass ready to be fixed up, further inland than ever.

VII

My mother retired to her room immediately on our return to the house. My uncle stayed till just before dinner, and then left. I seemed to be alone in a deserted house, so still were the servants, so quiet seemed everything. But now what was this sense of undefined dread that came upon me and would not let me rest? Why did I move from room to room? and what was goading me? Something was stirring like a blind creature across my brain, and it was too hideous to confront. Why should I confront it? Why scare one's soul and lacerate one's heart at every dark fear that peeps through the door of imagination, when experience teaches us that out of every hundred such dark fears ninety-nine are sure to turn out mere magic-lantern bogies?

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 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!

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 débris 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 passage 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 passed, 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!'

There had come a bite of sudden fire at my heart, and I shuddered with a dreadful knowledge, like the captain of an unarmed ship, who, while the unconscious landsmen on board are gaily scrutinising a sail that like a speck has appeared on the horizon, shudders with the knowledge of what the speck is, and hears in imagination the yells, and sees the knives, of the Lascar pirates just starting in pursuit. As I took in the import of those innocent words, falling from Winifred's bright lips, falling as unconsciously as water-drops over a coral reef in tropical seas alive with the eyes of a thousand sharks, my skin seemed to roughen with dread, and my hair began to stir.

At first she resisted my movement, but looking in my eyes and seeing that something had deeply disturbed me, she let me kiss her. 'What did you say, Henry?'

'That I love you so, Winnie, and cannot let you go just yet.'

'What a dear fellow it is!' she said; 'and all this ado about a poor girl with scarcely shoes to her feet.' Then, after an instant's pause, she said: 'But I thought you said something very different. I thought you said something about a curse, and that scared me.'

'Scared Winifred!' I said. 'Fancy anything scaring Winnie, who threatens to hit people when they offend her.'

'Ah! but I am scared,' said she, 'at things from the other world, and especially at a curse.'

'Why, what do you know about curses, Winifred?'

'Oh, a good deal. I have never forgotten that shriek of a cursed spirit which I heard at the Swallow Falls. And only a short time ago Sinfi Lovell nearly frightened me to death by a story of a whole Gypsy tribe having withered, one after the other—grandfathers, fathers, and children—through a dead man's curse. But what is the matter with you, Henry? You surely have turned very pale!'

'Well, Winnie,' said I, 'I am a little, just a little faint. After the funeral I could take no dinner. But it will he over in a minute. Let us go back a few yards and sit down upon the dry sand, and have a little more chat.'

We went and sat down, and my heart slowly resumed its function.

'Let me see, Winnie, what were we talking about? About rubies and diamonds, I think, were we not? You said that when your father bade you come out for a walk to-night, he had just been talking about rubies and diamonds. What was he saying about them, Winnie? But come and lay your head here while you tell me; lay it on my breast, Winnie, as you used to do in Graylingham Wood, and on these same sands.'

Evidently the earnestness of my manner and the suppressed passion in my voice drove out of her mind all her wise saws about the perils of wealth and all her wise determinations about the postponed betrothal, for she came and sat by my side and laid her head upon my breast.

'Yes. like that,' I said; 'and now tell me what your father was saying about precious stones; for I, too, take an interest in jewels, and have a great knowledge of them.'

'My father,' said Winifred, 'is going to have some diamonds and rubies given to him to-night by a friend of his, a sailor, who has come from India, and I am to go to London to-morrow to sell some of them; for you know, dear, we are very poor. That is why I am determined to go back to Shire-Carnarvon and see if I can get a situation as governess. Miss Dalrymple's recommendation will be of great aid. Poverty afflicts father more than it afflicts most people, and the rubies and diamonds and things will be of no use to us, you know.'

I could make her no answer.

'It seems a very strange kind of present from my father's friend,' she continued, meditatively; 'but it is a very kind one for all that. But, Henry, you surely are still very unwell; your heart is thumping underneath my ear like a fire-engine.'

'They are all love-thumps for Winifred,' I said, with pretended jocosity; 'they are all love-thumps for my Winnie.'

'But of course,' said she, 'this is quite a secret about the precious stones. My father enjoined me to tell no one, because the temptation to people is so great, and the cottage might be robbed, or I might be waylaid going to London. But of course I may tell you; he never thought of you.'

'No, Winnie, he never thought of me. You are very fond of him; very fond of your father, are you not?'

'Oh yes,' said she, 'I love him more than all the world—next to you.'

'Then he is kind to you, Winnie?' 'Ye—yes, as kind as he can be—considering—'

'Considering what, Winnie?'

'Considering that he's often—unwell, you know.'

'Winnie.' I said, as I gazed in the innocent eyes, 'whom are you considered to be the most like, your father or your mother?'

'I never knew my mother, but I am said to be partly like her. Why do you ask?'

'Only an idle question. You love me, Winnie?'

'What a question!'

'And you will do what I ask you to do, if I ask you very earnestly,
Winnie?'

'Certumly,' said Winifred, giving, with a forced laugh, the lisp with which that word had been given on a now famous occasion.

'Well, Winifred, I told you that I feel an interest in precious stones, and have some knowledge of them. There are certain stones to which I have the greatest antipathy: diamonds and rubies are the chief of these.

Now I want you to promise that diamonds and rubies and beryls shall never touch these fingers, these dear fingers, Winnie, which are mine, you know; they are mine now,' and I drew the smooth nails slowly along my lips. 'You are mine now, every bit.'

'Every bit,' said Winifred, but she looked perplexed.

She saw, however, by my face that, for some reason or other, I was deeply in earnest. She gave the promise. And I knew at least that those fingers would not be polluted, come what would. As to her going to London with the spoil, I knew how to prevent that.

But what course of action was I now to take? At this very moment perhaps Winifred's father was violating my father's tomb, unless indeed the crime might even yet he prevented. There was one hope, however. The drunken scoundrel whose daughter was my world I knew to be a procrastinator in everything. His crime might, even yet, be only a crime in intent; and, if so, I could prevent it easily enough. My first business was to hurry to the church, and, if not yet too late, keep guard over the tomb. But to achieve this I must get quit of Winifred without a moment's delay. Now Winifred's most direct path to the cottage was the path I myself must take to the church, the gangway behind Flinty Point. Yet she must not pass the church with me, lest an encounter with her father should take place. There was thus but one course open. I must induce her to take the gangway behind the other point of the cove; and how was this to be compassed? That was what I was racking my brain about.

'Winifred,' I said at last, as we sat and looked at the sea, 'I begin to fear we must be moving.'

She started up, vexed that the hint to move had come from me.

'The fact is,' I said, 'I particularly want to go into the old church.'

'Into the old church to-night?' said Winifred, with a look of astonishment and alarm that I could not understand.

'Yes; something was left undone there this afternoon at the funeral, and I must go at once. But why do you look so alarmed?'

'Oh, don't go into the old church to-night,' said Winifred.

I stood and looked at her, puzzled and strangely disturbed.

'Henry,' said she, 'I know you will think me very foolish, but I have not yet got over the fright that shriek gave me, the shriek we both heard the moment before the landslip. That shriek was not a noise made by the rending of trees, Henry. No, no; we both know better than that, Henry.'

I gave a start; for, try as I would, I had not really succeeded in persuading myself that what I had heard was anything but a human voice in terror or in pain.

'What do you think the noise was, then?' said I.

'I don't know; but I know what I felt as it came shuddering along the sand, and then went wailing over the sea.'

'What did you feel, Winnie?'

'My heart stood still, for it seemed to me to be the call from the grave.'

'The call from the grave! and pray what is that? I feel how sadly my education has been neglected.'

'Don't scoff, Henry. It is said that when the fate of an old family is at stake, there will sometimes come to him who represents it a call from the grave, and when I saw Snap standing stock still, his hair bristling with terror, I knew that it was no earthly shriek. I felt sure it was a call from the grave, and I knelt on the sands and prayed. Henry, Henry, don't go in the church to-night.'

That Winifred's words affected me profoundly I need not say. The shriek, whatever it was, had been responded to by her soul and by mine in the same mysterious way. But the important thing to do was to prevent her from imagining that her superstitious terrors had affected me.

'Really, Winnie,' I said, 'this double-voiced shriek of yours, which is at once the shriek of the Welshman at the bottom of the swollen falls and the Celtic call from the grave, is the most dramatic shriek I ever heard of. It would make its fortune on the stage. But with all its power of being the shriek of two different people at once, it must not prevent my going into the church to do my duty; so we had better part here at this very spot. You go up the cliffs by Needle Point, and I will take Flinty Point gangway.'

'But why not ascend the cliffs together?' said Winifred.

'Why, the prying coastguard might be passing, and might wonder to see us in the churchyard on the night of my father's funeral (he might take us for two ghosts in love, you know). However, we need not part just yet. We can walk on a little farther into the cove before our paths diverge.'

Winifred made no demur, though she looked puzzled, as we were then much nearer to the gangway I had selected for myself than to the gangway I had allotted to her.

IX

Winifred and I were in the little horseshoe curve called 'Church Cove,' but also called sometimes 'Mousetrap Cove,' because, as I have already mentioned, a person imprisoned in it by the tide could only escape by means of a boat from the sea.

Needle Point was at one extremity of the cove and Flinty Point at the other. In front of us, therefore, at the very centre of the cliff that surrounded the cove, was the old church, which I was to reach as soon as possible. To reach a gangway up the cliff it was necessary to pass quite out of the cove, round either Flinty Point or Needle Point; for the cliff within the cove was perpendicular, and in some parts actually overhanging.

When we reached the softer sands near the back of the cove, where the walking was difficult, I bade Winifred good-night, and she turned somewhat demurely to the left on her way to Needle Point, between which and the spot where we now parted she would have to pass below the church on the cliff, and close by the great masses of debris from the new landslip that had fallen from the churchyard. This landslip (which had taken place since she had left home for her moonlight walk) had changed the shape of the cove into a figure something like the Greek epsilon.

I walked rapidly towards Flinty Point, which I should have to double before I could reach the gangway I was to take. So feverishly possessed had I become by the desire to prevent the sacrilege, if possible, that I had walked some distance away from Winifred before I observed how high the returning tide had risen in the cove.

When I now looked at Flinty Point, round which I was to turn, I saw that it was already in deep water, and that I could not reach the gangway outside the cove. It was necessary, therefore, to turn back and ascend by the gangway Winifred was making for, behind Needle Point, which did not project so far into the sea. So I turned back. As I did so, I perceived that she had reached the projecting mass of debris in the middle of the semicircle below the churchyard, and was looking at it. Then I saw her stoop, pick up what seemed a paper parcel, open it, and hold it near her face to trace out the letters by the moonlight. Then I saw her give a start as she read it. I walked towards her, and soon reached the landslip. Evidently what she read agitated her much. She seemed to read it and re-read it. When she saw me she put it behind her back, trying to conceal it from me.

'What have you picked up, Winifred?' I said, in much alarm; for my heart told me that it was in some way connected with her father and the shriek.

'Oh, Henry!' said she, 'I was in hopes you had not seen it. I am so grieved for you. This parchment contains a curse written in large letters. Some sacrilegious wretch has broken into the church and stolen a cross placed in your father's tomb.'

God!—It was the very same parchment scroll from my father's tomb on which was written the curse! I was struck dumb with astonishment and dismay. The whole terrible truth of the situation broke in upon me at one flash. The mysterious shriek was explained now. Wynne had evidently broken open the tomb as soon as his daughter was out of the way. He had then, in order to reach the cottage without running the risk of being seen by a chance passenger on the Wilderness Road, blundered about the edge of the cliff at the very moment when it was giving way, and had fallen with it. It was his yell of despair amid the noise of the landslip that Winifred and I had both heard. My sole thought was for Winifred. She had read the curse; but where was the dead body of her father that would proclaim upon whose head the curse had fallen? I stared around me in dismay. She saw how deeply I was disturbed, but little dreamed the true cause.

'Oh, Henry,' said she, 'to think that you should have such a grief as this; your dear father's tomb violated!' and she sat down and sobbed. 'But there is a God in heaven,' she added, rising with great solemnity. 'Whoever has committed this dreadful crime against God and man will rue the day he was born:—the curse of a dead man who has been really wronged no penance or prayer can cure,—so my aunt in Wales used to say, and so Sinfi says;—it clings to the wrongdoer and to his children. That cry I heard was the voice of vengeance, and it came from your father's tomb.'

'It is a most infamous robbery,' I said; 'but as to the curse, that
is of course as powerless to work mischief as the breath of a baby.'
And again I anxiously looked around to see where was the dead body of
Wynne, which I knew must be close by.

'Oh, Henry!' said she, 'listen to these words, these awful words of your dead father, and the words of the Bible too.'

And she held up to her eyes, as though fascinated by it, the parchment scroll, and read aloud in a voice so awe-struck that it did not seem to be her voice at all:

'He who shall violate this tomb,—he who shall steal this amulet, hallowed as a love-token between me and my dead wife,—he who shall dare to lay a sacrilegious hand upon this cross, stands cursed by God, cursed by love, and cursed by me, Philip Aylwin, lying here. "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."—Psalm cix. So saith the Lord. Amen.'

'I am in the toils,' I murmured, with grinding teeth.

'What a frightful curse!' she said, shuddering. 'It terrifies me to think of it. How hard it seems,' she continued, 'that the children should be cursed for the father's crimes.'

'But, Winifred, they are NOT so cursed,' I cried. 'It is all a hideous superstition: one of Man's idiotic lies!'

'Henry,' said she, shocked at my irreverence, 'it is so; the Bible says it, and all life shows it. Ah! I wonder what wretch committed the sacrilege, and why he had no pity on his poor innocent children!'

While she was talking, I stooped and picked up the casket from which the letters had been forced by the fall. She had not seen it. I put it in my pocket.

'Henry, I am so grieved for you,' said Winifred again, and she came and wound her fingers in mine.

Grieved for me! But where was her father's dead body? That was the thought that appalled me. Should we come upon it in the débris? What was to be done? Owing to the tide, there was no turning back now to Flinty Point. The projecting debris must be passed. There was no dallying for a moment. If we lingered we should be caught by the tide in Mousetrap Cove, and then nothing could save us. Suppose in passing the débris we should come upon her father's corpse. The idea was insupportable. 'Thank God, however, I murmured, 'she will not even then know the very worst; she will see the corpse of her father who has fallen with the cliff, but she need not and will not associate him with the sacrilege and the curse.'

As I picked up the letters that had been scattered from the casket, she said,

'I cannot get that dreadful curse out of my head; to think that the children of the despoiler should be cursed by God, and cursed by your father, and yet they are as innocent as I am.'

'Best to forget it,' said I, standing still, for I dared not move towards the débris.

'We must get on, Henry,' said she, 'for look, the tide is unusually high to-night. You have turned back, I see, because Flinty Point is already deep in the water.'

'Yes,' I said, 'I must turn Needle Point with you. But as to the sacrilege, let us dismiss it from our minds; what cannot be helped had better be forgotten.'

I then cautiously turned the corner of the débris, leading her after me in such a way that my body acted as a screen. Then my eyes encountered a spectacle whose horror chilled my blood, and haunts me to this day in my dreams. About twelve feet above the general level of the sand, buried to the breast behind a mass of green sward fallen from the graveyard, stood the dead body of Wynne, amid a confused heap of earth, gravestones, trees, shrubs, bones, and shattered coffins. Bolt upright it stood, staring with horribly distorted features, as in terror, the crown of the head smashed by a fallen gravestone. Upon his breast glittered the rubies and diamonds and beryls of the cross, sparkling in the light of the moon, and seeming to be endowed with conscious life. It was evident that he had, while groping his way out of the crypt, slung the cross around his neck, in order to free his hands. I shudder as I recall the spectacle. The sight would have struck Winifred dead, or sent her raving mad, on the spot; but she had not turned the corner, and I had just time to wheel sharply round, and thrust my body between her and the spectacle. The dog saw it, and, foaming with terror, pointed at it.

'I beg your pardon, Winifred,' I said, falling upon her and pushing her back.

Then I stood paralysed as the full sinister meaning of the situation broke in upon my mind. Had the débris fallen in any other way I might have saved Winifred from seeing the most cruel feature of the hideous spectacle, the cross, the evidence of her father's sacrilege. I might, perhaps, on some pretence, have left her on this side the débris, and turning the corner, have mounted the heap and removed the cross gleaming in hideous mockery on the dead man's breast, and giving back the moonbeams in a cross of angry fire. One glance, however, had shown me that before this could be done, there was a wall of slippery sward to climb, for the largest portion of the churchyard soil had broken off in one lump. In falling, it had turned but half over, and then had slid down sideways, presenting to the climber a facet or sward nearly perpendicular and a dozen feet high. Wedged in between the jaggy top of this block and the wall of the cliff was the corpse, showing that Wynne had been standing by the fissure of the cliff at the moment when it widened into a landslip.

Nor was that all; between that part of the débris where the corpse was perched and the sand below was one of those long pools of sea-water edged by shingles, which are common features of that coast. It seemed that Destiny or Circumstance, more pitiless than Fate and Hell, determined on our ruin, had forgotten nothing.

The contour of the cove; the way in which the debris had been thrown across the path we now must follow in order to reach the only place of egress; the way in which the hideous spectacle of Wynne and the proof of his guilt had been placed, so that to pass it without seeing it the passenger must go blindfold; the brilliance of the moon, intensified by being reflected from the sea; the fulness of the high tide, and the swell—all was complete! As I stood there with clenched teeth, like a rat in a trap, a wind seemed to come blowing through my soul, freezing and burning. I cursed Superstition that was slaying us both. And I should have cursed Heaven but for the touch of Winnie's clasping fingers, silky and soft as when I first felt them as a child in the churchyard.

'What has happened?' asked she, looking into my face.

'Only a slip of my foot,' I said, recovering my presence of mind.

'But why do you turn back?'

'I cannot bring myself to part from you under this delicious moon, Winnie, if you will stay a few minutes longer. Let us go and sit on that very boulder where little Hal proposed to you.'

'But you want to go into the church,' said Winifred, as we moved back towards the boulder.

'No, I will leave that till the morning. I would leave anything till the morning, to have a few minutes longer with you on the sands. Try to imagine that we are children again, and that I am not the despised rich man but little Hal the cripple.'

Winifred's eyes, which had begun to look very troubled, sparkled with delight.

'But,' said she with a sigh, as we sat down on the boulder, 'I'm afraid we sha'n't be able to stay long. See how the tide is rising, and the sea is wild. The tides just now, father says, come right up to the cliff in the cove, and once locked in between Flinty Point and Needle Point there is no escape.'

'Yes, darling,' I muttered to myself, drawing her to me and burying my face in her bosom, 'there is one escape, only one.'

For death seemed to me the only escape from a tragedy far, far worse than death.

If she made me any answer I heard it not; for, as I sat there with closed eyes, schemes of escape fluttered before me and were dismissed at the rate of a thousand a second. A fiery photograph of the cove was burning within my brain, my mind was absorbed in examining every cranny and every protuberance in the semicircular wall of the cliff there depicted; over and over again I was examining that brain-picture, though I knew every inch of it, and knew there was not in the cliff-wall foothold for a squirrel.

X

The moon mocked me, and seemed to say:

'The blasting spectacle shining there on the other side of that heap of earth must be passed, or Needle Point can never be reached; and unless it is reached instantly you and she can never leave the cove.'

'Then we will never leave it,' I whispered to myself, jumping up.

As I did so I found for the first time that her forehead had been resting against my head; for the furious rate at which the wheels of thought were moving left no vital current for the sense of touch, and my flesh was numbed.

'Something has happened,' she said. 'And why did you keep whispering "yes, yes"? Whom were you whispering to?'

The truth was that, in that dreadful trance, my conscience had been saying to me, 'Have you a right to exercise your power over this girl by leading her like a lamb to death?' and my love had replied, 'Yes, ten thousand times yes.'

'Winifred,' I said, 'I would die for you.'

'Yes, Henry,' said she, 'I know it; but what have we to do with death now?'

'To save you from harm this flesh of mine would rejoice at crucifixion; to save you from death this soul and body of mine would rejoice to endure a thousand years of hell-fire.'

She turned pale, amazed at the delirium into which I had passed.

'To save you from harm, dear, I would,' said I, with a quiet fierceness that scared her, 'immolate the whole human race—mothers, and fathers, and children; I would make a hecatomb of them all to save this body of yours, this sweet body, alive.'

But I could not proceed. What I had meant to say was this,—

'And yet, Winnie, I have brought you here to this boulder to die!'

But I could not say it—my tongue rebelled and would not say it.

Winifred was so full of health and enjoyment of life that, courageous as she was. I felt that the prospect of certain and imminent death must appal her; and to see the look of terror break over her face confronting death was what I could not bear. And yet the thing must be said. But at this very moment, when my perplexity seemed direst, a blessed thought came to me—a subterfuge holier than truth. I knew the Cymric superstition about 'the call from the grave,' for had not she herself just told me of it?

'I will turn Superstition, accursed Superstition itself, to account,' I muttered. 'I will pretend that I am enmeshed in a web of Fate, and doomed to die here myself. Then, if I know my Winifred, she will, of her own free mind, die with me.'

'Winnie,' I said, 'I have to tell you something that I know must distress you sorely on my account—something that must wring your heart, dear, and yet it must be told.'

She turned her head sharply round with a look of alarm that almost silenced me, so pathetic was it. On that courageous face I had not seen alarm before, and this was alarm for evil coming to me. It shook my heart—it shook my heart so that I could not speak.

'I felt,' said she, 'that something awful had happened. And it affects yourself, Henry?'

'It affects myself.'

'And very deeply?'

'Very deeply, Winnie.'

Then, pulling from my pocket the silver casket and the parchment scroll, I said, 'It has relation to these.'

'That I felt,' said she; 'how could it be otherwise? Oh, the miscreant! I curse him; I curse him!'

'Winifred,' I said, 'between me and this casket, and the cross mentioned in this scroll, there is a mysterious link. The cross is an amulet, an heirloom of dreadful potency for good and ill. It has been disturbed; it has been stolen from my father's grave, and there is but one way of setting right that disturbance. To avert unspeakable calamity from falling upon two entire families (the family of Aylwin and that of her to whom this amulet was given) a sacrifice is demanded.'

'Henry, you terrify me to death. What is the sacrifice? Oh God! Oh
God!'

'My father's son must die, Winnie.'

She turned ashen pale, but struggling to be playful, she said, 'I fear that the family of Aylwin and the family of somebody else must even take the calamity and bear it; for I don't mean my Henry to die, let me assure both families of that.'

'Ah! but, Winnie, I am under a solemn oath and pledge to bear this penalty; and we part to-night, That shriek which so appalled you—'

'Well, well, the shriek?' said she, in a frenzy of impatience.

I made no answer, but she answered herself.

'That shriek was a call to you,' she cried, and then burst into a passion of tears. 'It cannot be,' she said. 'It cannot and shall not be; God is too good to suffer it,' Then she fixed her eyes upon me, and sobbed: 'Ah, it is true! I feel it is all true! Yes, they are calling you, and that is why my soul answered the call. Ah, when I saw you just now lift your head from my breast with a face grey and wizened as an old man's—when I saw you look at me, I knew that something dreadful had happened. Oh, I knew, I knew! but I thought it had happened to me. The love and pity in your eyes when you opened them upon me made me think it was my trouble, and not yours, that disturbed you. And now I know it is yours, and you are going to die! They are calling you. Yes, you are going to let the tide drown you! Oh, my love my love!' and her grief was so acute that I knew not at first whether in this I had done well after all.

'Winifred,' I said, 'you must bear this. I have always been ready to take death when it should come. I have at least had one blessed time with Winifred on the sands—Winifred the beloved and beautiful girl—one night, as the crown to the happy days that have been mine with Winifred the beloved and beautiful child. And that night, as we were walking by the sea, it seemed to me that such happiness as was ours can come but once—that never again could there be a night equal to that.'

Smiles broke through her tears as she listened to me. I had struck the right chord.

'And I thought so too,' she said. 'It was indeed a night of bliss. Indeed, indeed God has been good to us, Henry,' and she fell into my arms again.

'And now, Winnie,' I said, 'we must kiss and part—part for ever.'

Yes, I had struck the right chord. As she lay in my arms I felt her soft bosom moving with a little hysterical laugh of derision when I said we must part. And then she rose and sat beside me upon the boulder, looking calm and fearless at the tide as it got nearer and nearer to Needle Point.

'Yes, dear,' I said, looking in the same direction, 'you must be going; see how the waves are surrounding the Point. You must run, Winnie—you must run, and leave me.'

'Yes,' said she, still gazing across to the Point, 'as you say, I must run, but not yet, dear; plenty of time yet,' and she smiled to herself as she used to do in the old days, when as a child she had made up her mind to do something.

Then without another word she took her shawl from her shoulders, and pulled it out to see its length. And soon I felt her fingers stealing my penknife from my waistcoat-pocket, and saw her deftly cut up the shawl, strip after strip, and weave it and knot it into a rope, and tie the rope around her waist, and then she stooped to tie it around me.

It was when I felt her warm breath about my neck as she stooped over me to tie that rope, that love was really revealed to me; it was then, and not till then, that all my previous love for Winifred seemed as the flicker of a rushlight to Sálamán's cloak of fire; and a feeling of bliss unutterable came upon me, and the night air seemed full of music, and the sky above seemed opening, as she whispered, 'Henry, Henry, Henry, in a few minutes you will be mine.' But the very confidence with which she spoke these simple words startled me as from a dream. 'Suppose,' I thought, 'suppose my last drop of bliss with Winnie were being tasted now!' In a moment I felt like a coward. But then there came a loud crash and a thunder from behind the landslip.

'The settlement!' I cried. 'The coming in of the tide has made the landslip settle!'

When I sat with closed eyes examining my fiery photograph, I had calculated the 'settlement' at the return of the tide as being among the chances of escape. But feeling myself to be engaged in a duel with Circumstance (more cruel than the fiends), I believed that the settlement would come too late for us, or even if it did not come too late, it might not hide away the spectacle. The settlement had come; what had it done for us? This I must know at once.

'Untie the rope,' I said; 'quick, untie the rope, there is a settlement of the landslip.'

'But what has the settlement to do with us?' said Winnie.

'It has to do with us, dear; untie the rope. It has much to do with us, Winnie,' I said; for now the determination to save her life came on me stronger than ever.

When the rope was untied, I said, 'Wait till I call,' and I ran round the corner of the débris. The great upright wall of earth and sward, from which had stared the body of Wynne, had fallen, hiding him and his crime together!

To return round the corner of the landslip and call Winifred was the work of an instant, and, quick as she was in answering my call, by the time she had reached me I had thrown off my coat and boots.

'Now for a run and a tussle with the waves, Winnie,' I said.

'Then we are not going to die?'

'We are going to live. Run; in six more returns of a wave like that there will he four feet of water at the Point.'

'Come along, Snap,' said Winifred, and she flew along the sands without another word.

Ah, she could run!—faster than I could, with my bruised heel! She was there first.

'Leap in, Winnie,' I cried, 'and struggle towards the Point; it will save time. I shall he with you in a second.'

Winifred plunged into the tide (Snap following with a bark), and fought her way so bravely that my fear now was lest she should be out of her depth before I could reach her, and then, clad as she was, she would certainly drown. But never tor a moment did her good sense leave her. When she was nearly waist-high she stopped and turned round, gazing at me as I tore through the shallow water—gazing with a wistful, curious look that her face would have worn had we been playing.

To get round the Point and pull Winifred round was no slight task, for the water was nearly up to my breast, and a woman's clothing seems designed for drowning her. Any other woman than Winifred would have been drowned, and would have drowned me with her. But in straits of this kind the only safety lies in courage.

'What a night's adventures!' said Winifred, after we had turned the Point, and were walking through the shallow water towards the gangway.

We hurried towards the cottage as fast as our wet clothes would permit. On reaching it we found the door unlocked, and entered.

'Father has again gone to bed,' said Winifred, 'and left no candle burning for me.'

And without seeing her face, I knew by the tremor of the hand I clasped that she was listening with shame for the drunken snore that she would never hear again.

I lighted a match, which with a candle I found on a chair.

'Your father is no doubt sound asleep,' I said; 'you will scarcely awake him to-night?'

'Oh dear, no,' said Winifred. 'Good-night. You look quite ill. Ever since you lifted up your head from my breast, when you were thinking so hard, you have looked quite ill.'

Suddenly I remembered that I must be up and on the sands betimes in the morning, to see whether the tide had washed away the fallen earth so as to expose Wynne's body. To prevent Winifred from seeing the stolen cross was now the one important thing in the world.

I bade her good-night and walked towards home.

XI

She was right: those few minutes of concentrated agony had in truth made me ill. My wet clothes clinging round my body began to chill me now, and as I crept into the house and upstairs to my room, my teeth were chattering like castanets.

As I threw off my wet clothes and turned into bed, I was partially forewarned by the throbbing at my temples, the rolling fire at the back of my eyeballs, the thirst in my parched throat, that some kind of illness, some kind of fever, was upon me. And no wonder, after such a night!

In that awful trance, when I had sat with my face buried on Winifred's breast, not only had the physiognomy of the cove, but every circumstance of our lives together, been photographed in my brain in one picture of fire. When, after the concentrated agony of those first moments of tension, I looked up into Winifred's face, as though awakening from a dream, my flesh had 'appeared,' she told me, 'grey and wizened, like the flesh of an old man.' The mental and physical effects of this were now gathering around me and upon me.

From a painful slumber I awoke in about an hour with red-heat at my brain and with a sickening dread at my heart. 'It is fever,' thought I; 'I am going to be ill; and what is there to do in the morning at the ebb of the tide before Winifred can go upon the sands? I ought not to have come home at all,' I said. 'Suppose illness were to seize me and prevent my getting there?' The dreadful thought alone paralysed me quite. Under it I lay as under a nightmare. I scarcely dared try to get out of bed, lest I should find my fears well-grounded. At last, cautiously and timorously, I put one leg out of bed and then the other, till at length I felt the little ridges of the carpet; but my knees gave way, my head swam, my stomach heaved with a deadly nausea, and I fell like a log on the floor.

As I lay there I knew that I was indeed in the grasp of fever. I nearly went crazed from terror at the thought that in a few minutes I should perhaps lapse into unconsciousness and be unable to rise—unable to reach the sands in the morning and seek for Wynne's body—unable even to send some one there as a substitute to perform that task. But then whom was I to send? whom could I entrust with such a commission? I was under a pledge to my dead father never to divulge the secret of the amulet save to my mother and uncle. And besides, if I would effectually save Winifred from the harm I dreaded, the hideous sacrilege committed by her father must be kept a secret from servants and townspeople. Whom then could I send on this errand? At the present moment, there were but four people in the world who knew that the cross and casket had been placed in the coffin—my mother, my uncle, myself, and now, alas! Winifred. My mother was the one person who could do what I wanted done. Her sagacity I knew; her courage I knew. But how could I—how dare I, broach such a matter to her? I felt it would be sheer madness to do so, and yet, in my dire strait, in my terror at the illness I was fighting with, I did it, as I am going to tell.

By this time the noise of my fall had brought up the servants. They lifted me into bed and proposed fetching our medical man. But I forbade them to do so, and said, 'I want to speak to my mother.'

'She is herself unwell, sir,' said the man to whom I spoke.

'I know,' I replied. 'Call her maid and tell her that my business with my mother is very important, or I would not have dreamed of disturbing her; but see her I must.'

The man looked dubious, but observing my wet clothes on a chair he seemed to think that something had happened, and went to do my bidding.

In a very short time my mother entered the room. I felt that my moments of consciousness were brief, and began my story as soon as we were alone. I told her how the sudden dread that Wynne would steal the amulet had come upon me; I told her how I had run down to the churchyard and discovered the landslip; I told her how, on seeing the landslip, I had descended the gangway and found the body of Wynne, the amulet, the casket, and the written curse. But I did not tell her that I had met Winifred on the sands. Excited as I was, I had the presence of mind not to tell her that.

As I proceeded with my narrative, with my mother sitting by my bedside, a look of horror, then a look of loathing, then a look of scorn, swept over her face. I knew that the horror was of the sacrilege. I knew that the loathing and the haughty scorn expressed her feeling towards the despoiler—the father of her whose cause I might have to plead; and I began to wish from the bottom of my heart that I had not taken her into my confidence. When I got to the finding of Tom's body, and the look of terror stamped upon his face, a new expression broke over hers—an expression of triumphant hate that was fearful.

'Thank God at least for that!' she said. Then she murmured, 'But that does not atone.'

Ah! how I regretted now that I had consulted her on a subject where her proud imperious nature must be so deeply disturbed. But it was too late to retreat.

'Henry,' she said, 'this is a shocking story you tell me. After losing my husband this is the worst that could have happened to me—the violation of his sacred tomb. Had I only hearkened to my own misgiving about the miscreant! Yet I wonder you did not wait till the morning before telling me.'

'Wait till the morning?' I said, forgetting that she did not know what was at my heart.

'Doubtless the matter is important, Henry,' said she. 'Still, the mischief is done, the hideous crime has been committed, and the news of it could have waited till morning.'

'But, mother, unless my father's words are idle breath, it is important, most important, that the amulet should again be buried with him. I meant to go to the sands in the morning and wait for the ebbing tide—I meant to take the cross from the breast of the dead man, and to replace it in my father's coffin. That, mother, was what I meant to do. But I am too ill to move; I feel that in an hour or so, or in a few minutes, I shall be delirious. And then, mother! Oh, then!—'My mother looked astonished at my vehemence upon the subject.

'Henry,' she said, 'I had no idea that you felt such an interest in the matter; I have certainly misjudged your character entirely. And now, what do you want me to do?'

'Nobody,' I said, 'must know of the cross but ourselves. I want you, mother, to do what I cannot do: I want you to go on the sands and wait for the turn of the tide; I want you to take the cross from Wynne's breast, if the body should be exposed, and secure it in secret till it can be replaced in the coffin.'

'I do this, Henry?' said my mother, with a look of bewilderment at my earnestness. 'Yet there is reason in what you say, and grievous as the task would be for me, I must consider it.'

'But will you engage to do it, mother?'

'Really, Henry, you forget yourself,—you forget your mother too. For me to go down to the sands and watch the ebbing of the tide, and then defile myself by touching the body of this wretch, is a task I naturally shrink from. Still if, on thinking it over, I find it my duty to do it, it will not be needful for me to enter into a compact with my son that my duty to my dead husband shall be performed. Good-night. I quite think you will be better in the morning. I see no signs myself of the fever you seem to dread, and, alas! I am not, as you know, ignorant of the way in which a fever begins.'

She was going out of the room when I exclaimed, in sheer desperation, 'Mother, I have something else to say to you. You remember the little girl, the little blue-eyed girl, Wynne's daughter, who came here once, and you were so kind to her, so gracious and so kind'; and I seized her hand and covered it with kisses, for I was beside myself with alarm lest my one hope should go.'

The sudden little laugh of bitter scorn that came from my mother's lips, the sudden spasm that shook her frame, the sudden shadow as of night that swept across her features, should at once have hushed my confession. But I went on: my tongue would not stop now: I felt that my eloquence, the eloquence of Winifred's danger, must conquer, must soften even the hard pride of her race.

'And she has never forgotten your graciousness to her, mother.'

'Well?' said my mother, in a tone whose velvet softness withered me.

'Well, mother, she is in all things the very opposite of her father. This very night she told me'—and I was actually on the verge of repeating poor Winifred's prattle about her resembling her mother, and not her father (for already my brain had succumbed to the force of the oncoming fever, and the catastrophe I was dreading made of me a frank and confiding child).

'Well?' said my mother, in a voice softer and more velvety still.
'What did she tell you?'

That tone ought to have convinced me of the folly, the worse than folly, of saying another word to her.

'But I can conquer her,' I thought; 'I can conquer her yet. When she comes to know all the piteousness of Winifred's case, she must yield.'

'Yes, mother,' I cried, 'she is in all things the very opposite of Tom. She has such a horror of sacrilege; she has such a dread of a crime and a curse like this; she has such a superstitious belief in the power of a dead man's curse to cling to the delinquent's offspring, that, if she knew of what her father had done, she would go mad—raving mad, mother—she would indeed!' And I fell hack on the pillow exhausted.

'Well, Henry, and is this what you summoned me from my bed to tell me—that Wynne's daughter will most likely object to share the consequences of her father's crime? A very natural objection, and I am really sorry for her; but further than that I have certainly no affair with her.'

'But, mother, the body of her father lies beneath the débris on the shore; the ebbing tide may leave it exposed, and the poor girl, missing her father in the morning, will seek him perhaps on the shore and find him—find him with the proof of his crime on his breast, and know that she inherits the curse—my father's curse! Oh, think of that, mother—think of it. And you only can prevent it.'

For a few moments there was intense silence in the room. I saw that my mother was reflecting. At last she said:

'You say that Wynne's daughter told you something to-night. Where did you see her?'

'On the sands.'

'At what hour?'

'At—at—at—about eleven, or twelve, or one o'clock.'

I felt that I was getting into a net, but was too ill to know what I was doing. My mother paused for awhile; I waited as the prisoner tried for his life waits when the jury have retired to consult. I clutched the bedclothes to stay the trembling of my limbs. On a chair by my bedside was my watch, which had been stopped by the sea-water. I saw her take it up mechanically, look at it, and lay it down again. In the agony of my suspense I yet observed her smallest movement.

'And in what capacity am I to undertake this expedition?' said she at length, in the same quiet tone, that soul-quelling tone she always adopted when her passion was at white-heat. 'Is it in the capacity of your father's wife executing his wishes about the amulet? Or is it as the friend, protectress, and guardian of Miss Wynne?'

She sat down again by my bedside, and communed with herself—sometimes fixing an abstracted gaze upon me, sometimes looking across me at the very spot where in the shadow beside my bed I bad seemed to see the words of the Psalmist's curse written in letters of fire. At last she said quietly, 'Henry, I will undertake this commission of yours.'

'Dear mother!' I exclaimed in my delight. 'I will undertake it,' pursued my mother in the same quiet tone, 'on one condition.'

'Any condition in the world, mother. There is nothing I will not do, nothing I will not sacrifice or suffer, if you will only aid me in saving this poor girl. Name your condition, mother; you can name nothing I will not comply with.'

'I am not so sure of that, Henry. Let me be quite frank with you. I do not wish to entrap you into making an engagement you cannot keep. You have corroborated to-night what I half suspected when I saw you talking to the girl in the churchyard; there is a very vigorous flirtation going on between you and this wretched man's daughter.'

'Flirtation? 'I said, and the incongruity of the word as applied to such a passion as mine did not vex or wound me; it made me smile.

'Well, for her sake, I hope it is nothing more,' said my mother. 'In view of the impassable gulf between her and you, I do for her sake sincerely hope that it is nothing more than a flirtation.'

'Pardon me, mother,' I said, 'it was the word "flirtation" that made me smile.'

'We will not haggle about words, Henry; give it what name may please you, it is all the same to me. But flirtations of this kind will sometimes grow serious, as the case of Percy Aylwin and the Gypsy girl shows. Now, Henry, I do not accuse you of entertaining the mad idea of really marrying this girl, though such things, as you know, have been in our family. But you are my only son, and I do love you, Henry, whatever may be your opinion on that point; and, because I love you, I would rather, far rather, be a lonely, childless woman in the world, I would far rather see you dead on this floor, than see you marry Winifred Wynne.'

'Ah! mother, the cruelty of this family pride has always been the curse of the Aylwins.'

'It seems cruel to you now, because you are a boy, a generous boy. You think it the romantic, poetic thing to elevate a low girl to your own station—perhaps even to show your superiority to conventions by marrying the daughter of the miscreant who has desecrated your own father's tomb. But, Henry, I know the race to which you and I belong. In five years' time—in three years, or perhaps in two—you will thank me for this; you will say: "My mother's love was not cruel, but wise."'

'Oh, mother!' I said, 'any condition but that.'

'I see that you know what my condition is before I utter it. If you will give me your word—and the word of an Aylwin is an oath—if you will give me your word that you will never marry Winifred Wynne, I will do as you desire. I will myself go upon the sands in the morning, and if the body has been exposed by the tide I will secure the evidence of her father's guilt, in order to save the girl from the suffering which the knowledge of that guilt would cause her, as you suppose.'

'As I suppose!'

'Again I say, Henry, we will not quarrel about words.'

I turned sick with despair.

'And on no other terms, mother?'

'On no other terms,' said she.

'Oh, mercy, mother! mercy! you know not what you do. I could not live without her; I should die without her.'

'Better die then!' exclaimed my mother, with an expression of ineffable scorn, and losing for the first time her self-possession; 'better die than marry like that.'

'She is my very life now, mother.'

'Have I not said you had better die then? On no other terms will I go on those sands. But I tell you frankly what I think about this matter. I think that you absurdly exaggerate the effect the knowledge of her father's crime will have upon the girl.'

'No, no; I do not. Mercy, dear mother, mercy! I am your only child.'

'That is the very reason why you, who may some day be the heir of one of the first houses in England, must never marry Winifred Wynne.'

'But I don't want to be heir of the Aylwins; I don't want my uncle's property,' I retorted. 'Nor do I want the other bauble prizes of the Aylwins.'

'Providence has taken Frank, and says you must stand where you stand,' replied my mother solemnly. 'You may even some day, should Cyril be childless, succeed to the earldom, and then what an alliance would this be!'

'Earldom! I'd not have it. I'd trample on the coronet. Gingerbread!
I'd trample it in the mud, if it were to sever me from Winifred.'

'You must succeed to it should Cyril Aylwin, who seems disinclined to marry, die childless,' said my mother quietly; 'and by that time you may perhaps have reached man's estate.'

'Pity, mother, pity!' I cried in despair, as I looked at the strong woman who bore me.

'Pity upon whom? Have pity upon me, and upon the family you now represent. As to all the fearful effects that the knowledge of this sacrilege will have upon the girl, that is a subject upon which you must allow me to have my own opinion. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and provides thick skins for the canaille. What will concern her chiefly, perhaps entirely, will be the loss of her father, and she will soon know of that, whether she finds the body on the sands or not. This kind of person is not nearly so sensitive as my romantic Henry supposes. However, my condition will not be departed from. If you consent to give up this girl I will go on the sands; I will defile my fingers; I will secure the stolen amulet at the ebb of the tide, should the corpse become exposed. If you will not consent to give her up, there is an end of the matter, and words are being wasted between us.'

'Give up Winifred, mother? That is not possible.'

'Then there is no more to be said. We will not waste our time in discussing impossibilities. And I am really so depressed and unwell that I must return to my room. I hope to hear you are better in the morning, and I think you will be. The excitement of this night and your anxiety about the girl have unstrung your nerves, and you have lost that courage and endurance which are yours by birthright.'

And she left the room.

But she had no sooner gone than there came before my eyes the insupportable picture of a slim figure walking along the sands stooping to look at some object among the débris, standing aghast at the sight of her dead father with the evidence of his hideous crime on his own breast; there came the sound of a cry to 'Henry' for help! I beat my head against the bedstead till I was nearly stunned. I yelled and bellowed like a maniac: 'Mother, come back!'

When she returned to my bedside my eyes were glaring so that my mother stood appalled, and (as she afterwards owned to me) was nearly yielding her point.

'Mother,' I said,'I consent to your condition: I will give her up—but oh, save her! Let there be no dallying, let there be no risk, mother. Let nothing prevent your going upon the sands in the morning—early, quite early—and every morning at the ebbing of the tide.'

'I will keep my word,' she said.

'You will use the fullest and best means to save her?'

'I will keep my word,' she said, and left the room.

'I have saved her!' I cried over and over again, as I sank back on my pillow. Then the delirium of fever came upon me, and I lay tossing as upon a sea of fire.