I found that Miss Wynne remembered all her past life down to her first seizure on Raxton sands, while everything that had since passed was a blank. Since her recovery her presence here has seemed to shed a richer sunlight over the old place, but of course she is no longer the fairy child who before her cure fascinated me more than any other living creature could have done.
Apart from her sweet companionship, she has been of great service to me in my art. When I learnt who she was, I should not have dreamed of asking her to sit to me as a model without having first taken your views, and you were, as I understood, abroad; but she herself generously volunteered to sit to me for a picture I had in my mind, 'The Spirit of Snowdon.' It was a failure, however, and I abandoned it. Afterwards, knowing that I was at my wits' end for a model in the painting I have been for a long time at work upon, 'Zenelophon,' she again offered to sit to me. The result has been that the picture, now near completion, is by far the best thing I have ever done.
I had noticed for some time that Sinfi's mind seemed to be running upon some project. Neither Miss Wynne nor I could guess what it was. But a few days ago she proposed that Miss Wynne and she should take a trip to North Wales in order to revisit the places endeared to them both by reminiscences of their childhood. Nothing seemed more natural than this. And Sinfi's noble self-sacrifice for Miss Wynne had entitled her to every consideration, and indeed every indulgence.
And yesterday they started for Wales. It was not till after they were gone that I learnt from another newspaper paragraph that you did not go to Japan, and are in Wales. And now I begin to suspect that Sinfi's determination to go to Wales with Miss Wynne arose from her having suddenly learnt that you are still there.
And now, my dear Alywin, having acted as a somewhat prosaic reporter of these wonderful events, I should like to conclude my letter with a word or two about what took place when I parted from you in the streets of London. I saw then that your sufferings had been very great, and since that time they must have been tenfold greater. And now I rejoice to think that, of all the men in this world who have ever loved, you, through this very suffering, have been the most fortunate. As Job's faith was tried by Heaven, so has your love been tried by the power which you call 'circumstance' and which Wilderspin calls 'the spiritual world.' All that death has to teach the mind and the heart of man you have learnt to the very full, and yet she you love is restored to you, and will soon be in your arms. I, alas! have long known that the tragedy of tragedies is the death of a beloved mistress, or a beloved wife. I have long known that it is as the King of Terrors that Death must needs come to any man who knows what the word 'love' really means. I have never been a reader of philosophy, but I understand that the philosophers of all countries have been preaching for ages upon ages about resignation to Death—about the final beneficence of Death—that 'reasonable moderator and equipoise of justice,' as Sir Thomas Browne calls him. Equipoise of justice indeed! He who can read with tolerance such words as these most have known nothing of the true passion of love for a woman as you and I understand it. The Elizabethans are full of this nonsense; but where does Shakespeare, with all his immense philosophical power, ever show this temper of acquiescence? All his impeachments of Death have the deep ring of personal feeling—dramatist though he was. But, what I am going to ask you is, How shall the modern materialist, who you think is to dominate the Twentieth Century and all the centuries to follow—how shall he confront Death when a beloved mistress is struck down? When Moschus lamented that the mallow, the anise, and the parsley had a fresh birth every year, whilst we men sleep in the hollow earth a long, unbounded, never-waking sleep, he told us what your modern materialist tells us, and he re-echoed the lamentation which, long before Greece had a literature at all, had been heard beneath Chaldean stars and along the mud-banks of the Nile. Your bitter experience made you ask materialism, What comfort is there in being told that death is the very nursery of new life, and that our heirs are our very selves, if when you take leave of her who was and is your world it is 'Vale, vale, in æternum vale'? The dogged resolution with which at first you fought and strove for materialism struck me greatly. It made you almost rude to me at our last meeting.
When I parted from you I should have been blind indeed had I failed to notice how scornfully you repudiated my suggestion that you should replace the amulet in the tomb from which it had been stolen. I did not then know that the tomb was your father's. Had I known it my suggestion would have been much more emphatic. I saw that you had the greatest difficulty in refraining from laughing in my face when I said to you that you would eventually replace it. Yes, you had great difficulty in refraining from laughing. I did not take offence. I felt sure that the cross was in some way connected with the young lady you had lost in Wales, but I could not guess how. Had you told me that the cross had been taken from your father's tomb I should no doubt have connected it with the cry of 'Father' which had, I knew, several times been uttered in Wilderspin's studio by the model in her paroxysms, and I should have earlier done what I was destined to do—I should earlier have brought you together. From sympathy that sprang from a deep experience I knew you better than you knew yourself. When I learnt from Sinfi Lovell that you had fulfilled my prophecy I did not laugh. Tears rather than laughter would have been more in my mood, for I realised the martyrdom you must have suffered before you were impelled to do it. I knew how you must have been driven by sorrow—driven against all the mental methods and traditions of your life—into the arms of supernaturalism. But you were simply doing what Hamlet would have done in such circumstances—what Macbeth would have done, and what he would have done who spoke to the human heart through their voices. All men, I believe, have Macbeth's instinct for making 'assurance doubly sure,' and I cannot imagine the man who, entangled as you were in a net of conflicting evidence—the evidence of the spiritual and the evidence of the natural world—would not, if the question were that of averting a curse from acting on a beloved mistress, have done as you did. That paralysis of Hamlet's will which followed when the evidence of two worlds hung in equipoise before him, no one can possibly understand better than I. For it was exactly similar to my own condition on that never-to-be-forgotten night when she whom I lost…
While the marvellous sight fell, or appeared to fall, upon my eyes, my blood, like Hamlet's, became so masterful that my reason seemed nothing but a blind and timorous guide. No sooner had the sweet vision fled than my reason, like Hamlet's, rose and rejected it. It was not until I became acquainted with the rationale of sympathetic manifestations—it was not till I learnt, by means of that extraordinary book of your father's, which seems to have done its part in turning friend Wilderspin's head, what is the supposed method by which the spiritual world acts upon the material world—acts by the aid of those same natural bonds which keep the stars in their paths—that my blood and my reason became reconciled, and a new light came to me. And I knew that this would be your case. Yes, my dear Aylwin, I knew that when the issues of Life are greatly beyond the common, and when our hearts are torn as yours has been torn, and when our souls are on fire with a flame such as that which I saw was consuming you, the awful possibilities of this universe—of which we, civilised men or savage, know nothing—will come before us, and tease our hearts with strange wild hopes, 'though all the "proofs" of all the logicians should hold them up to scorn.'
I am, my dear Aylwin,
Your sincere Friend,