'Have you not
seen the curse literally fulfilled?' ancestral voices of the
blood--voices Romany and Gorgio--seemed whispering in my ears. 'Have
you not heard the voice of his daughter upon whose head the curse of
your dead father has fallen a beggar in the street, while not all
your love can succour her or reach her?'
And then my soul would cry out in its agony, 'Most true, Fenella
Stanley--most true, Philip Aylwin; but before I will succumb to such
a theory of the universe as yours, a theory which reason laughs at
and which laughs at reason, I will die--die by this hand of mine:
this flesh that imprisons me in a world of mocking delusion shall be
destroyed, but first the symbol itself of your wicked, cruel old
folly shall go.'
I would then leap from my bed, light a candle, unlock my cabinet,
take out the cross, and holding it aloft prepare to dash it against
the wall, when my hand would be arrested by the same ancestral
voices, Romany and Gorgio, whispering in my ears and at my heart,
'If you break that amulet, how shall you ever be able to see what
would be the effect upon Winnie's fate of its restoration to your
father's tomb?'
And then I would laugh aloud and mock the voices of Fenella Stanley
and Philip Aylwin and millions of other voices that echoed or
murmured or bellowed through half a million years, echoed or murmured
or bellowed from European halls and castles, from Gypsy tents, from
caves of palaeolithic man.
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