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.