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
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