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 my friends in vain tried to argue me out of such an unreasonable terror by pointing out, truly enough, that he could not possibly be within the zone of danger at that time. I could only repeat: "I know that something terrible has happened to him, wherever he is. It may not be death, but it is some terrible calamity."
I spent the day in tears and in absolute despair, and wrote to tell him of my conviction. Allowing for difference of time between Quetta and Oxford, my mental telegram reached me in the same hour that my brother, whilst on the march, and only thirty miles beyond Quetta, was suddenly struck down in his tent by the paralysis which kept him confined to his chair—a helpless sufferer—for twenty-eight years.
Perhaps, now that I know so much more of mental currents, I might have received a more definite message as regards the true nature of the calamity. It could not have been more marked, nor more definite as regards the fact of it.
My condition of hopeless misery obliged me to put off all engagements that day, and I did nothing but fret and lament over him, with the exception of writing the one letter mentioned, in which I told him of my strange and sad experience.
In time, of course, the first sharp impression passed, and soon a cheery letter arrived from him, written, of course, before the fatal day. My experience in Oxford occurred on the morning of 4th December 1878. It was well on in January 1879 before the corroboration arrived, in a letter written to us by a stranger. Communication was delayed not only by the war, but also by the fact that my poor brother was lying at the time deprived of both movement and speech, and could only spell out later, by the alphabet, the address of his people at home.
CHAPTER II
INVESTIGATIONS IN AMERICA, 1885-1886
An interval of seven years occurs between the events recorded in the last chapter and my first visit to America, which took place in the autumn of 1885.