And that was all. He never heard his wife’s voice any more. Kennaston read contentedly for a couple of hours, and went to bed. It was in the morning the maid found Mrs. Kennaston dead and cold. She had died in her sleep, quite peacefully, after taking two headache powders, while her husband was contentedly pursuing the thread of a magazine story through the advertising columns....
Kennaston had never spoken to her concerning the sigil. Indeed, I do not well see how he could have dared to do so, in view of her attitude in a world so opulent in insane asylums. But among her effects, hidden away as before in the press in her bathroom, Kennaston found both the pieces of metal. They were joined together now, forming a perfect circle, but with the line of their former separation yet visible.
He showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told this tale....
I had thought from the first there would prove to be supernal double-dealing back of all this. The Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, I suspect—windows which face on other worlds than ours; and They permit this-or-that man to peer out fleetingly, perhaps, just for the joke’s sake; since always They humorously contrive matters so this man shall never be able to convince his fellows of what he has seen, or of the fact that he was granted any peep at all. The Wardens without fail arrange what we call—gravely, too—“some natural explanation.”
Kennaston showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told this tale....
“You are interested in such things, you see—just as Kathleen said. And I have sometimes wondered if when she said, ‘Perhaps Mr. Harrowby could tell you,’ the words did not mean more than they seemed then to mean—?”
I was interested now, very certainly. But I knew that Kathleen Kennaston had referred not at all to my interest in certain of the less known sides of existence, which people loosely describe as “occult.”
And slowly, I comprehended that for the thousandth time the Wardens of Earth were uncompromised; that here too They stayed unconvicted of negligence in Their duty: for here was at hand the “natural explanation.” Kennaston’s was one of those curious, but not uncommon, cases of self-hypnosis, such as Fehlig and Alexis Bidoche have investigated and described. Kennaston’s first dream of Ettarre had been an ordinary normal dream, in no way particularly remarkable; and afterward, his will to dream again of Ettarre, co-operating with his queer reading, his temperament, his idle life, his belief in the sigil, and co-operating too—as yet men may not say just how—with the hypnotic effects of any trivial bright object when gazed at steadily, had been sufficient to induce more dreams. I could understand how it had all befallen in consonance with hackneyed laws, insane as was the outcome.
And the prelate and the personage had referred, of course, to the then-notorious nineteenth and twentieth chapters of Men Who Loved Alison, in which is described the worship of the sigil of Scoteia—and which chapters they, in common with a great many other people, considered unnecessarily to defile a noble book. The coincidence of the mirrors was quaint, but in itself came to less than nothing; for as touches the two questions as to white pigeons, the proverb alluded to by the personage, concerning the bird that fouls its own nest, is fairly familiar, and the prelate’s speech was the most natural of prosaic inquiries. What these two men had said and done, in fine, amounted to absolutely nothing until transfigured in the crucible of an ardent imagination, by the curious literary notion that human life as people spend it is purposeful and clearly motived.