Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the illiterate locutions and the eccentric orthography of Fenella’s letters and the subtle remarks and speculations upon the symbols of nature.—­the dukkeripen of the woods, the streams, the stars, and the winds.  But when I came to analyse the theories of man’s place in nature expressed in the ignorant language of this Romany heathen, they seemed to me only another mode of expressing the mysticism of the religious enthusiast Wilderspin, the more learned and philosophic mysticism of my father, and the views of D’Arcy, the dreamy painter.

As I rode back to London, I said to myself, ’What change has come over me?  What power has been gradually sapping my manhood?  Why do I, who was so self-reliant, long now so passionately for a friend to whom to unburthen my soul—­one who could give me a sympathy as deep and true as that I got from Sinfi Lovell, and yet the sympathy of a mind unclouded by ignorant superstitions?’

With the exception of D’Arcy, whose advice as to the disposal of the cross had proclaimed him to be as superstitious as Sinfi herself, not a single friend had I in all London.  Indeed, besides Lord Sleaford (a tall, burly man with the springy movement of a prize-tighter, with blue-grey eyes, thick, close-cropped hair, and a flaxen moustache, who had lately struck up a friendship with my mother) I had not even an acquaintance.  Cyril Aylwin, whom I had not seen since we parted in Wales, was now on the Continent with Wilderspin.  Strange as it may seem, I looked forward with eagerness to the return of this light-hearted jester.  Cyril’s sagacity and knowledge of the world had impressed me in Wales; but his cynical attitude, whether genuine or assumed, towards subjects connected with deep passion, had prevented my confiding in him.  He must, I knew, have gathered from Sinfi, and from other sources, that I was mourning the loss of a Welsh girl in humble life; but during our very brief intercourse in Wales neither of us had mentioned the matter to the other.  Now, however, in my present dire strait I longed to call in the aid of his penetrative mind.

VIII

ISIS AS HUMOURIST

I

On reaching London I resumed my wanderings through the London streets.  Bitter as these wanderings were, my real misery now did not begin until I got to bed.  Then began the terrible struggle of the soul that wrestles with its ancestral fleshly prison—­that prison whose warders are the superstitions of bygone ages.  ’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.’