'How shall you stay the curse from working in the blood of the
accursed one?' the voices would say. And then I would laugh again
till I feared the people in the hotel would hear me and take me for a
maniac.
But then my aunt's picture of a beggar-girl standing in the rain
would fill my eyes and the whispers would grow louder than the voice
of the North Sea in the March wind: 'Look at _that_. How dare you
leave undone anything, howsoever wild, which might seem to any
one--even to an illiterate Gypsy, even to a crazy mystic--a means of
finding Winifred? What is the meaning of the great instinct which has
always conquered the soul in its direst need--which has always driven
man when in the grip of unbearable calamity to believe in powers that
are unseen? What though that scientific reason of yours tells you
that Winifred's misfortunes have nothing to do with any curse? what
though your reason tells you that all these calamities may be read as
being the perfectly natural results of perfectly natural causes? Is
the voice of man's puny reason clothed with such authority that it
dares to answer his heart, which knows nothing but that it bleeds?
The terrible facts of the case may be read in two ways.
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