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.'