At last, by an immense effort of will, I closed my eyes and pushed the lid violently on one side.

* * * * *

The ‘sweet odours and divers kinds of spices’ of the Jewish embalmer rose like a gust of incense—­rose and spread through the crypt like the sweet breath of a new-born blessing, till the air of the charnel-house seemed laden with a mingled odour of indescribable sweetness.  Never had any odour so delighted my senses; never had any sensuous influence so soothed my soul.

While I stood inhaling the scents of opobalsam, and cinnamon and myrrh, and wine of palm and oil of cedar, and all the other spices of the Pharaohs, mingled in one strange aromatic cloud, my personality seemed again to become, in part, the reflex of ancestral experiences.

I opened my eyes.  I looked into the coffin.  The face (which had been left by the embalmer exposed) confronted mine.  ‘Fenella Stanley!’ I cried, for the great transfigurer Death had written upon my father’s brow that self-same message which the passions of a thousand Romany ancestors had set upon the face of her whose portrait hung in the picture-gallery.  And the rubies and diamonds and beryls of the cross as it now hung upon my breast, catching the light of the opened lantern in my left hand, shed over the features an indescribable reflex hue of quivering rose.

Beneath his head I placed the silver casket:  I hung the hair-chain round his neck:  I laid upon his breast the long-loved memento of his love and the parchment scroll.

Then I sank down by the coffin, and prayed.  I knew not what or why.  But never since the first human prayer was breathed did there rise to heaven a supplication so incoherent and so wild as mine.  Then I rose, and laying my hand upon my father’s cold brow, I said:  ’You have forgiven me for all the wild words that I uttered in my long agony.  They were but the voice of intolerable misery rebelling against itself.  You, who suffered so much—­who know so well those flames burning at the heart’s core—­those flames before which all the forces of the man go down like prairie-grass before the fire and wind—­you have forgiven me.  You who knew the meaning of the wild word Love—­you have forgiven your suffering son, stricken like yourself.  You have forgiven me, father, and forgiven him, the despoiler of your tomb:  you have removed the curse, and his child—­his innocent child—­is free.’

I replaced the coffin-lid, and screwing it down left the crypt, so buoyant and exhilarated that I stopped in the churchyard and asked myself:  ’Do I, then, really believe that she was under a curse?  Do I really relieve that my restoring the amulet has removed it?  Have I really come to this?’

Throughout all these proceedings—­yes, even amidst that prayer to Heaven, amidst that impassioned appeal to my dead father—­had my reason been keeping up that scoffing at my heart which I have before described.