WHEN last I wrote and told you about the Devi, I had a vague hope that my stephanotis would, indirectly, prove that the lovely girl, from whose hand it had fallen, gathered it in some heavenly garden, beyond mortal ken, where Death and Time are unknown.

I did not like to say so, but I meant to keep the flower, and, if I had seen it fade and die, I should have been disappointed, perhaps even rather surprised. You will say such fantastic ideas can only come to people whose minds have been warped by contact with Oriental mysticism; and, while you are probably right, I reply that when you have a TÂj, when you have an atmosphere of sunshine unsoiled by coal-smoke, when, in fine, any really big miracle is wrought in your Western world, then you may see a Devi sitting in the moonlight, you may hear angelic music played by a boy unknown to the critics, and you may even weave romances round a spray of stephanotis.

I guarded my flower carefully, and, for five days, I could not see that it showed any sign of fading. True I kept it in water, even when I was travelling; and, if it came from a heavenly garden, I dare say that care was altogether needless; but we are creatures of habit, and my Faith was not very robust, and leaned somewhat heavily on Hope. I had to leave Agra and journey through Rajputana. On the fifth day from that night, which I had almost said “was worth, of other nights, a hundred thousand million years,” I was in Jaipur, and from there I visited the glorious Palace of Amber. I restrain myself with difficulty from going into raptures over that ancient castle, which, for so many centuries, has stood on that distant hillside and watched its many masters come and go, while the ladies loved, and gossiped, and hated, in the Hall of a Thousand Delights, and the horsemen and spearmen went down from the gates to the dusty road, the seething plains, whence many of them never returned.

I will spare you. You are long-suffering, but there must be a limit even to your patience. I know that qui s’excuse s’accuse, and I offer no excuse for trying to draw for you the pictures that are only seen beyond beaten tracks. Ruskin has said, “The greatest thing the human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.” If thousands can think for one who can see, surely there must be still thousands who see and cannot tell “in a plain way” what they saw. There are millions whose eyes are to them only what animals’ eyes are—aids to the gratification of appetite. There are thousands more who do see and appreciate, yet cannot put what they have seen into words; cannot communicate their own feelings, cannot help another to share, even a little, in the joy that has come to them through greater opportunities. I have often wondered why people who have seen the most interesting places on earth, have been present perhaps on memorable occasions, and have met the most famous people of their time, showed, in their conversation, no sign of these advantages, and, if questioned, could only give the most disappointing, uninteresting description of any personal experiences. Then there are the very few who have seen, and can help others to see again, through their eyes; but they seldom do it, because they have found that, with rare exceptions, the relation of their experiences is but little appreciated. Ruskin himself is one of the few who can see and can describe, but others may hesitate to string the plain words, knowing how little worthy they will be of what the eyes have seen.

Some of this I may have been thinking, as I slowly made my way back to Jaipur; but, when I reached the house of my sojourn, almost the first thing I noticed was that the tiny vase which had carried my spray of stephanotis was empty of all but water. Of course I sent for everybody, and made minute inquiries, and, of course, every one had seen the flower, and no one had touched it, and I was left to draw any conclusion I pleased.

I drew none. There are no data on which to come to a conclusion; but the facts remind me of a story I will tell you.

I have an Italian friend. He is a very uncommon type, and worthy of far more attention than I will give him now, because, for the moment, I am concerned rather with his story than with him. He was in Egypt, and whilst there he discovered a buried city. Carefully and wisely he kept his knowledge to himself, till, owing to an absence of some months, he lost all trace of the place, and never found it again. A sand-storm had buried it once more.

The original discovery was purely the result of accident, and his first researches had to be conducted in secrecy, without assistance, otherwise the trouvaille would have become public property. His explorations led him to a building that he believed was a tomb; and having, by laborious efforts, gained an entrance, he had the satisfaction of proving that his surmise was correct, and also the reward of finding in the chamber a single sarcophagus, containing a mummified girl, or woman, in wonderful preservation. He knew the common superstition that disaster would befall any one who disturbed a mummy; but he thought little of the tale, and did not mean to be deterred from removing the body when he should have the means to do so. Meanwhile he had to be content with what he could carry, and that consisted of a few coins, and a necklace which he unfastened from the lady’s poor shrivelled neck, or rather from the cere-cloths in which it was swathed.

Perhaps you have never seen one of these mummy necklaces; they are rather curious, and, from my friend’s account of it, the one he found nearly resembled others which I have seen myself. The material seemed to be some kind of pottery, or opaque glass made into rough beads, and short lengths of small glazed piping, strung together in a quaint pattern. The prevailing colour was a sort of turquoise with an extra dash of green, and every bit of piping was so tinted; but, alternately with these blue lengths, were strung groups of round beads, in bunches of two to six or eight, or even more. By far the majority of the beads were turquoise-blue, but some were yellow, others brown, and a few almost black, and the arrangement was such that it could easily have been made to represent a string of words. The effect of the chain was bizarre but attractive, and it somewhat resembled the rosaries worn by devout Arabs. The intrinsic worth of the thing was nil, but sometimes one has a friend who will accept and value un rien like this, for the sake of the giver, when jewels would be declined. My Italian had such a friend, and the bauble found a new home on her neck.

Not long after she had begun to wear the quaint little chain which had lain for so many centuries round the throat of the dead Egyptian, its new owner was distressed and alarmed by a persistent form of nightmare, which gradually induced a feeling that she was haunted by the wraith of a dark-skinned girl, of a type of feature unlike any known to her, but clad in raiment such as she fancied had been worn by Egyptians in the days of the Pharaohs. The apparition was always clothed in the same manner, and though she wore a number of strangely fashioned ornaments, her neck was left completely bare. The girl seemed to be ever present in her dreams, and her face always wore a look of extreme distress, as of one who grieved for the loss of some dearly beloved friend or possession. The curious part of it was, that the dream-girl seemed always to come to the sleeper as to one from whom she could get relief; and while, in her earlier appearances, she had the expression and the manner of a supplicant, the dreamer fancied that latterly there had been a change, and the dark face looked both agonised and threatening.

These visitations, which could not be ascribed to any reasonable cause, had so got on the lady’s nerves that she had gone for change to a villa on the coast of Normandy. The change of scene brought no relief. The haunting form of the Egyptian girl, though not a nightly visitor, was so constantly present, that the dread of seeing her deprived sleep of all power of giving rest, and the poor lady was not only becoming seriously ill, but she was so affected by her uncanny infliction, that she even sometimes imagined she caught glimpses of her tormentor when she herself was wide awake.

One afternoon, the lady was lying in a darkened room, the persiennes closed to keep out the hot and penetrating rays of a summer sun. She felt very weary and despondent, the result of many broken nights and the prolonged strain on her nerves, and, though she held a book in her hand she was all the time wondering how much longer she could bear this oppression, and what she had done to deserve such a weirdly horrible fate. In a dull sort of way she supposed she must be going mad, and felt with grim cynicism that the border-land between sanity and insanity was so narrow that she would hardly realise the moment when she crossed it. There was absolute silence everywhere, except for the faint soothing whisper of the sea, rippling over the sand beneath the wooded bluff on which the villa stood. The air was warm and heavy with summer perfumes; the room was darkening slowly as the sun dipped towards the placid waters of La Manche; the woman was deadly weary, and she slept.

At first her sleep must have been sound; but, after a time, her eyes opened to that other consciousness which is of the world of dreams, and once again she saw her now dreaded companion, the dark-eyed, dark-skinned girl from the land of the Pharaohs. The girl seemed to plead in impassioned terms for something, but the dreamer could not understand the strange words, and racked her brain, as dreamers will, to try to imagine their meaning. The girl burst into a storm of tears, sinking to the ground in her grief and despair, and burying her face on a pile of cushions. Still the dreamer, suffering torture herself, was helpless to relieve the other. Then suddenly the girl sprang up, and, dashing the tears from her eyes, which now seemed to blaze with murderous resolve, she sprang upon the white woman, enlaced her throat with supple brown fingers, pressed and pressed, tighter and tighter—ah, God! the horror and the suffocating pain of it—and all the while the sleeper’s hands seemed tied to her side. Then with a scream the dreamer awoke. She felt her eyes must be starting from her head, and instinctively raised her hands to her throat, only to realise that her vivid sensation of strangulation was merely a nightmare, but that the chain—the string of turquoise beads which she had never unfastened from the day she first put it on—was gone.

There was now little light in the room, only enough to see things vaguely, yet the lady declares that in that first moment of waking she distinctly saw a figure, exactly like that of the girl of her dreams, glide swiftly away from her and pass out through a portiÈre into the verandah. For some time she was too frightened and unnerved to move, but when at last she summoned her people they had seen no one.

The only thing that was real was that she had lost the necklace, and never saw it again. As some compensation she also lost for ever the society of her dream-visitor, and completely recovered her own health.

Now who took my stephanotis?