How far away in the past seemed those events!  And as to my mother’s anger against Winifred, that anger and cruel scorn of class which had concerned me so much, how insignificant now seemed this and every other obstacle in love’s path!  I looked up at the moonlit sky; I leaned upon a gate and looked across the silent fields where Winifred and I used to gather violets in spring, hedge-roses in summer, mushrooms in autumn, and I said, ’I will marry her; she shall be mine; she shall be mine, though all the powers on earth, all the powers in the universe, should say nay.’

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. Dupre 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.