Seen and Unseen. E. Katherine Bates
wriggle out of it that way."
"Never mind, Major Bates," said Morton Freer good-naturedly. "Let us go on all the same, and see what they mean to spell out."
Fortunately, we did so, with a most interesting result; for the right name was given after all, but spelt in the Hindoostanee and not the European fashion. The name in true Hindoostanee was Rám Dín—but Europeans spelt it Rham Deen—and so my brother himself had entirely forgotten when the A was given that it had any connection with the man's name. When the whole word was spelt out, of course he remembered, and then his face was a study!
"Good gracious! it is right enough, and that is the real Hindoostanee spelling, too. I never thought of that when the A came!"
I think this episode knocked the bottom out of his scepticism for some years to come.
Even now this case precludes ordinary and conscious telepathy. Mr. Podmore would be reduced to explaining that the Hindoostanee spelling was latent in my brother's consciousness, though his normal self repudiated it.
Another curious incident—still more difficult to explain upon the Thought Transference Theory (unless we stretch it to include a possible impact of all thoughts, at all times and from all quarters of the globe, upon everyone else's brain)—occurred under the same hospitable roof.
One of the Archdeacon's nieces came to stay in the house about this time. She was considerably my senior, and was very kind to me, with the thoughtful kindness an older woman can show to a sensitive young girl. This awakened in me an affection which, I am thankful to say, still exists between us. This lady was considerably under thirty years old at the time, but to my young ideas she seemed already in the sear and yellow leaf from the matrimonial point of view! One must remember how different the standard of age was more than thirty years ago!
It was also the time when marriage was looked upon not only as the most desirable, but as almost the only possible, career for a woman.
So when Morton and this lady and I were "sitting at the table" in the gloaming one evening, I said, with trembling eagerness: "Morton, do ask if Carrie will ever be married," for the case seemed to me almost desperate at the advanced age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight!
I must mention that for some occult reason (which I have entirely forgotten) I trusted fervently that a Hungarian or Polish name might be given after the satisfactory "Yes" had been spelt out, but, alas! nothing of the kind occurred.
"The table" began with a D, and then successively E, H, A, V were given. No one ever heard of a Polish or Hungarian name of the kind, and I remember saying petulantly: "Oh, give it up, Morton. It's all nonsense! Nobody ever heard of a Mr. Dehav."
Once more Morton rescued a really good bit of evidence by his imperturbable perseverance.
"Wait a bit! Let us see what is coming," he said.
I took no further personal interest in the experiment. Either Morton concluded the name was finished, or there was some confusion in getting the next letters, owing doubtless to my impetuous disgust. Anyway, he went on to say:
"Let us ask where the fellow lives at the present time." This was instantly answered by "Freshwater," and the further information given that he was a widower.
None of us knew any man, married or single, who lived at Freshwater, and the incident was relegated to the limbo of failures.
Several years later, however, my friend did marry a gentleman whose name (a very pretty one) began with the five despised letters, and he was a widower, and had been living in his own house at Freshwater at the time mentioned. She did not meet him until some years after our curious experience.
About the same time, but in the south of England, my attention was again drawn to metapsychics by an experience connected with the death of the famous Marquis of Hastings, of horse-racing repute. As a young girl I lived close to the Mote Park at Maidstone, where his sister, the present Lady Romney, was then living as Lady Constance Marsham. The Reverend David Dale Stewart and his wife (he was Vicar of Maidstone, and I made my home with them for some years after leaving school) were friends of hers, and she sometimes came to see them in a friendly way in the morning. On one of these occasions, when Lady Constance had just returned from paying her brother a visit in a small shooting-box in the eastern counties (I think), Mrs. Stewart remarked that she was afraid the change had not done Lady Constance much good, as she was looking far from well. In those days Lady Romney was an exceptionally strong and healthy young woman.
She said rather impatiently: "Well, the fact is I did a very stupid thing the other day—I never did such a thing before—I fainted dead away for the first time in my life."
Asked for the reason of this, she told us that she and her husband and Lord and Lady Hastings were dining quietly one evening together, two guests who had been expected not having arrived by the train specified.
Looking up Bradshaw, and finding no other train that could bring them until quite late at night, the other four sat down to dinner. Soup and fish had already been discussed, when a carriage was heard driving up to the door, and they naturally concluded that their guests had discovered some means of getting across country by another line. Lord Hastings said:
"Tell Colonel and Mrs—— that we began dinner, thinking they could not arrive till much later, but that we are quite alone, and beg they will join us as soon as possible."
The servant went to the door, prepared with the message given, flung it open—but no carriage, no horses were there! Everybody had heard it driving up, nevertheless.
Remembering the old family legend that a carriage and pair is heard driving up the avenue before the head of the Hastings family dies, Lady Romney fainted dead away, very much to her own surprise and mortification; for she was, and doubtless is still, an uncommonly sensible woman, "quite above all superstitions."
The episode struck me as curious at the time; but the impression passed, and a few days later I went to pay a visit to friends of mine in Buckinghamshire. Soon after my arrival I happened to mention the story, and was much laughed at as a "superstitious little creature, to think twice of such nonsense." "Of course, everyone had been mistaken in supposing they heard wheels or horses' hoofs—nothing could be simpler!"
And yet before I left that house, three weeks later, all the newspapers were full of long obituary notices of the Marquis of Hastings. These were so interesting that my friend's husband had reached the second long column in The Times before any of us remembered my story, which had been treated with so much contempt. It suddenly flashed across my mind: "Owen! Remember the carriage and pair and how you laughed at me!" They were forced to confess "it was certainly rather odd," the usual refuge of the psychically destitute!
A shake of the kaleidoscope, and I see another incident before me of more personal interest.
At the time of the outbreak of the Afghan War, in the autumn of 1878, I was living with very old friends in Oxford. My brother of the Rám Dín incident was once more in India, and had been Military Secretary for some years at Lahore to Sir Robert Egerton, who was at that time Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab.
When the war broke out, my brother, of course, went off to join his regiment for active service; but at the time of my experience it was impossible that he could have reached the seat of war, and I knew this well.
I was in excellent spirits about him, for he had been through many campaigns, and loved active service, as all good soldiers do. Moreover, I had just read a charming letter which Sir Robert Egerton had sent him on resigning his appointment as Military Secretary to take up more active duty to his country.
Yet it was just at this juncture—when, humanly speaking, there was no cause for any special anxiety—that I woke up one morning with the gloomiest and most miserable forebodings about this special brother. Nothing of the kind had ever occurred to me before, though he had been through many campaigns in India, China, Abyssinia, and elsewhere.
It was an overwhelming conviction of some great and definite disaster to him, and