It was his yell of despair amid
the noise of the landslip that Winifred and I had both heard. My sole
thought was for Winifred. She had read the curse; but where was the
dead body of her father that would proclaim upon whose head the curse
had fallen? I stared around me in dismay. She saw how deeply I was
disturbed, but little dreamed the true cause.
'Oh, Henry,' said she, 'to think that you should have such a grief as
this; your dear father's tomb violated!' and she sat down and sobbed.
'But there is a God in heaven,' she added, rising with great
solemnity. 'Whoever has committed this dreadful crime against God and
man will rue the day he was born:--the curse of a dead man who has
been really wronged no penance or prayer can cure,--so my aunt in
Wales used to say, and so Sinfi says;--it clings to the wrongdoer and
to his children. That cry I heard was the voice of vengeance, and it
came from your father's tomb.'
'It is a most infamous robbery,' I said; 'but as to the curse, that
is of course as powerless to work mischief as the breath of a baby.
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