Aylwin Part 42

What knowest thou, Nin-ki-gal?

What showest thou, Nin-ki-gal?

Have pity, O Queen of Queens!

NIN-KI-GAL.

Nor king nor slave I know, Nor tribes, nor s.h.i.+bboleths; But Life-in-Death I know-- Yea, Nin-ki-gal I know-- Life's Queen and Death's.

And what was the effect upon me of these communings with the ancestors whose superst.i.tions I have, perhaps, been throughout this narrative treating in a spirit that hardly becomes their descendant?

The best and briefest way of answering this question is to confess not what I thought, as I went on studying my father's book, its strange theories and revelations, but what I did. I read the book all day long: I read it all the next day. I cannot say what days pa.s.sed.

One night I resumed my wanderings in the streets for an hour or two, and then returned home and went to bed,--but not to sleep. For me there was no more sleep till those ancestral voices could be quelled--till that sound of Winnie's song in the street could be stopped in my ears. For very relief from them I again leapt out of bed, lit a candle, unlocked the cabinet, and taking out the amulet, proceeded to examine the I facets as I did once before when I heard in the Swiss cottage these words of my stricken father:--

'Should you ever come to love as I have loved, you will find that materialism is intolerable--is h.e.l.l itself--to the heart that has known a pa.s.sion like mine. You will find that it is madness, Hal, madness, to believe in the word "never"! You will find that you _dare_ not leave untried any creed, howsoever wild, that offers the heart a ray of hope.'

And then while the candle burnt out dead in the socket I sat in a waking dream.

III

The bright light of morning was pouring through the window. I gave a start of horror, and cried, 'Whose face?' Opposite to me there seemed to be sitting on a bed the figure of a man with a fiery cross upon his breast. That strange wild light upon the face, as it the pains at the heart were flickering up through the flesh--where had I seen it?

For a moment when, in Switzerland, my father bared his bosom to me, that ancestral flame had flashed up into his dull lineaments. But upon the picture of 'The Sibyl' in the portrait-gallery that illumination was perpetual!

'It is merely my own reflex in a looking-gla.s.s,' I exclaimed.

Without knowing it I had slung the cross round my neck.

And then Sinfi Lovell's voice seemed murmuring in my ears, 'Fenella Stanley's dead and dust, and that's why she can make you put that cross in your feyther's tomb, and she will, she will.'

I turned the cross round: the front of it was now next to my skin.

Sharp as needles were those diamond and ruby points as I sat and gazed in the gla.s.s. Slowly a sensation arose on my breast, of pain that was a pleasure wild and new. _I was feeling the facet_. But the tears trickling down, salt, through my moustache tears of laughter; for Sinfi Lovell seemed again murmuring, 'For good or for ill, you must dig deep to bury your daddy.'

What thoughts and what sensations were mine as I sat there, pressing the sharp stones into my breast, thinking of her to whom the sacred symbol had come, not as a blessing, but as a curse--what agonies were mine as I sat there sobbing the one word 'Winnie,'--could be understood by myself alone, the latest blossom of the pa.s.sionate blood that for generations had brought bliss and bale to the Aylwins.

I cannot tell what I felt and thought, but only what I did. And while I did it my reason was all the time scoffing at my heart (for whose imperious behoof the wild, mad things I am about to record were done)--scoffing, as an Asiatic malefactor will sometimes scoff at the executioner whose pitiless and conquering saw is severing his bleeding body in twain. I arose and murmured ironically to Fenella Stanley as I wrapped the cross in a handkerchief and placed it in a hand-valise: 'Secrecy is the first thing for us sacrilegists to consider, dear Sibyl, in placing a valuable jewel in a tomb in a deserted church. To take any one into our confidence would be impossible; we must go alone. But to open the tomb and, close it again, and leave no trace of what has been done, will require all our skill. And as burglars' jemmies are not on open sale we must buy, on our way to the railway-station, screw-drivers, chisels, a hammer, and a lantern; for who should know better than you, dear Sibyl, that the palace of Nin-ki-gal is dark?'

IV

As I hurried towards the Great Eastern Railway station, I felt like a horse drawn by a Gypsy whisperer to do something against his own will, and yet in the street I stopped to buy the tools. Reaching Dullingham in the afternoon, I lunched there; and as I walked thence along the cliff, towards Raxton, I became more calm and collected. I determined not to go near the Hall, lest my movements should be watched by the servants. The old churchyard was full of workmen of the navvy kind, and I learned that for the safety of the public it had now become necessary to hurl down upon the sands some enormous ma.s.ses of the cliff newly disintegrated by the land-springs. I descended the gangway at Flinty Point, and concealing my implements behind a boulder in the cliff, ascended Needle Point, and went into the town.

I had previously become aware, from conversations with my mother, that Wynne had been succeeded as custodian of the old church by Shales, the humpbacked tailor, and I apprehended no difficulty in getting the keys of the church and crypt from my simple-minded acquaintance, without arousing his suspicions as to my mission.

Therefore I went at once to the tailor's shop, but found that Shales was out, attending an annual Odd-Fellows' carousal at Graylingham.

Consequently I was obliged to open my business to his mother, a far shrewder person, and one who might be much more difficult to deal with. However, the fact of the navvies being at work so close to a church whose chancel belonged to my family afforded an excellent motive for my visit. But before I could introduce the subject to Mrs.

Shales, I had to listen to an exhaustive chronicle of Raxton and Graylingham doings since I had left. Hence by the time I quitted her (with a promise to return the keys in the morning) the sun was setting.

But, as I walked along Wilderness Road towards the church, a new and unexpected difficulty presented itself to my mind. I could not, without running the risk of an interruption, enter the church till after the Odd-Fellows had all returned from Graylingham, as Shales and his companions would have to pa.s.s along Wilderness Road, which skirts the churchyard. Shales himself was as short-sighted as a bat; but his companions had the usual long-sight of agriculturists, and would descry the slightest movement in the church-yard, or any glimmer of light at the church windows.

I would have postponed my enterprise till the morrow; but another important appointment at the office of our solicitor with my mother, precluded the possibility of this. So my visit to the catacomb must perforce be late at night.

Accordingly I descended the cliff and waited to hear the return of the carousers. There I sat down upon the well-remembered boulder, lost in recollections of all that had pa.s.sed on those sands, while over the sea the night spread like the widening, darkening wings of an enormous spectral bird, whose brooding voice was the drone of the waves as they came nearer and nearer. Then I began to think of what lay before me, of the strangeness and wildness of my life.

Then I recalled, with a shudder I could not repress, those sepulchral chambers beneath the church, which, owing, I believe, to the directions in an ancestor's will, had been the means of saving it from demolition after a large portion of the churchyard bad been condemned as dangerous. Raxton church is the only one along the coast that can boast a crypt: all the churches are Perpendicular in style, too late for crypts; a fact which is supposed to indicate that Raxton was, in very early times, a seaside town of great importance; for the crypt is much older than the church, and of an entirely different kind of architecture. It was once a depository for the bones of Danish warriors killed before the Norman Conquest; it extends not only beneath the chancel, as in most cases, but beneath both the transepts. The vaulting (supported partly on low columns of remarkable beauty and partly on the bas.e.m.e.nt wall of the church) is therefore of unusual extent. The external door in the churchyard is now hidden by drifted sand and mould. Many years ago, to give place to the tombs and coffins of my family, the bones of the old Danes were piled together in various corners; and the thought of these bones called up the picture of the abode of 'Nin-ki-gal,' the Queen of Death,

Ghosts, like birds, flutter their wings there; On the gate and the gate-posts the dust lies undisturbed.

Then my mind began to make pictures for itself of my father lying in his coffin. I have, I think, already said that his body had been embalmed, in order to allow of its being conveyed from Switzerland to England. Therefore I had no dread of being confronted by that attribute of Death alluded to by D'Arcy which is the most cruel and terrible of all--corruption. But then what change should I find in the _expression_ of those features which on the day of the interment had looked so calm? A thrill ran through my frame as I pictured myself raising the coffin-lid, and finding expressed upon the face, in language more appalling than any malediction in articulate speech--the curse!

At about ten o'clock I mounted the gangway and waited behind a deserted bungalow built for Fenella Stanley till I should hear the Odd-Fellows returning. In a few minutes I heard them approaching.

They were singing s.n.a.t.c.hes of songs they had been entertained with at Graylingham, and chatting and laughing as they went down Wilderness Road towards Raxton. As they pa.s.sed the bungalow and adjoining mill there was a silence.

I heard one man say: ''Ez Tom Wynne's ghooast bin seen here o' late?'

'Nooa, but the Squoire's 'ez,' said another.

'_I_ say they've both on 'em bin seed,' exclaimed a third voice, which I recognised to be that of old Lantoff of the 'Fis.h.i.+ng Smack'--'leaseways, if they ain't bin seed they've bin 'eeared. One Sat.u.r.day arternoon old Sal Gunn wur in the church a-cleanin' The Hall bra.s.ses, an' jist afore sundown, as she wur a-comin' away, she 'eeared a awful scrimmage an squealin' in the crypt, and she 'eeared the v'ice o' the Squoire a-callin' out, and she 'eeared Tom Wynne's v'ice a-cussin' an' a-swearin' at 'im. And more nor that, Sal told me that on the night when the Squoire wur buried, she seed Tom a-draggin' the Squoire's body along the churchyard to the cliff; only she never spoke on it at the time. And Sal says she larnt in a dream that the moment as Tom went and laid 'is 'and on that 'ere dimind cross in the coffin, up springs Squoire and claps 'old o' Tom's throat, and Tom takes 'old on him, and drags him out o' the church, meanin' to chuck him over the cliffs, when G.o.d o' mighty, as wur a-keepin' 'is eye on Tom all the time, he jist lets go o' the cliffs and down they falls, and kills Tom, an' buries him an' Squoire tew.'

'Did you say Sal seed all that in a dream? or did she see it in ole ale, Muster Lantoff?' said Shales.

'Well,' replied Lantoff, as the party turned past the bungalow, 'p'raps it wur ole ale as made me see in this very bungaler when I wur a bor the ghooast o' the great Gypsy lady whose pictur hangs up at the Hall, her as they used to call the old Squoire's Witch-wife.'

Soon the singing and laughing were renewed; and I stood and listened to the sounds till they died away in the distance. Then I unlocked the church door and entered.

V

As I walked down an aisle, the echoes of my footsteps seemed almost loud enough to be heard on the Wilderness Road. No one could have a more contemptuous disbelief in ghosts than I, and yet the man's words about the ghost of Fenella Stanley haunted me. When I reached the heavy nailed door leading down to the crypt, I lit the lantern. The rusty key turned so stiffly in the lock, that, to relieve my hands (which were burdened with the implements I had brought), I slung the hair-chain of the cross around my neck, intending merely to raise the coffin-lid sufficiently high to admit of my slipping the amulet in.

Having, with much difficulty, opened the door, I entered the crypt.

The atmosphere, though not noisome, was heavy, and charged with an influence that worked an extraordinary effect upon my brain and nerves. It was as though my personality were becoming dissipated, until at last it was partly the reflex of ancestral experiences.

Scarcely had this mood pa.s.sed before a sensation came upon me of being fanned as if by clammy bat-like wings; and then the idea seized me that the crypt scintillated with the eyes of a malignant foe. It was as if the curse which, until I heard Winnie a beggar singing in the street, had been to me but a collocation of maledictory words, harmless save in their effect upon her superst.i.tious mind, had here a.s.sumed an actual corporeal shape. In the uncertain light shed by the lantern, I seemed to see the face of this embodied curse with an ever-changing mockery of expression; at one moment wearing the features of my father; at another those of Tom Wynne; at another the leer of the old woman I had seen in Cyril's studio.

'It is an illusion,' I said, as I closed my eyes to shut it out; 'it is an illusion, born of opiate fumes or else of an over-taxed brain and an exhausted stomach.' Yet it disturbed me as much as if my reason had accepted it as real. Against this foe I seemed to be fighting towards my father's coffin as a dreamer lights against a nightmare, and At last I fell over one of the heaps of old Danish bones in a corner of the crypt. The candle fell from my lantern, and I was in darkness. As I sat there I pa.s.sed into a semi-conscious state. I saw sitting at the apex of a towering pyramid, built of phosph.o.r.escent human bones that reached far, far above the stars, the 'Queen of Death, Nin-ki-gal,' scattering seeds over the earth below.

At the pyramid's base knelt the suppliant figure of a Sibyl pleading with the Queen of Death:

What answer, O Nin-ki-gal?

Have pity, O Queen of Queens!

And the Sibyl's face was that of Fenella Stanley--her voice was that of Sinfi Lovell.

And then from that dizzy height seemed to come a cackling laugh:--

'You makes me blush, an' blow me if blus.h.i.+n' ain't bin an' made _t'other_ eye dry. I lives in Primrose Court, Great Queen Street, an'

my reg'lar perfession is a-sellin' coffee "so airly in the mornin',"

and I've got a darter as ain't quite so 'ansom as me, bein' the moral of her father.'

And now in my vision I perceived that Nin-ki-gal's face was that of the old woman I had seen in Cyril's studio, and that she was dressed in the same fantastic in which Cyril had bedizened her.