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.