Scarcely had this mood passed 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 superstitious mind, had here
assumed 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.
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