“What happened next?”
“I read your letter many times. Your arms seemed to steal around me as I read. I turned my face against your breast, and wept myself to calmness. It mattered not that my head was buried in my pillow. Your letter had brought you so near; you came between me and all outward things. I repeated again and again: ‘Nothing can untwine my life from thine.’
“The warning against spiritualism reached me just in time. The poor French ‘Madame’ was an ardent spiritualist. She had secured a medium, and was already in communication with her daughters. They had told her their favourite flowers and had reminded her that they used to prefer ‘Chocolat’ to ‘café au lait,’ for breakfast. Also that ‘Antoinette’ used to darn their stockings. Antoinette was an old ‘bonne’ who had been with them many years.
“These undeniable facts filled ‘Madame’ with a holy rapture. She implored me to come and receive like comfort. I might have yielded, had it not been for your timely warning.
“Madame’s husband, sons, another daughter and two cousins, had come to her in her sorrow. She was quickly growing resigned—comforted—almost elated. Her ‘deuil’ was infinitely becoming.
“But I? I had been robbed of my All. I dreaded Madame de Villebois’ frequent visits, yet knew my darling would not wish me to refuse to see her, lest she should think I resented the awful part her children had played in my life’s tragedy. And, after all, it was madame’s outpourings which first caused the Great Idea to formulate in my mind.
“‘Ah,’ she cried one day, ‘the brave, the wonderful Sir Nigel! So full of “joie de vivre”! So life abounding! No; he cannot stay parmi les morts. Such as he, must live again.... Quite soon, quite soon, he will live again. Il reviendra!’
“‘Quite soon? Quite soon?’ I repeated the words, when my visitor had departed. Quite soon! Ah, what it would be to know that my darling was on earth again; breathing the same air; seeing the same sunshine. Oh, if he came back quite soon!
“I remembered all you had thought and said on this great subject. You took the Bible instance of the prophet Elijah reappearing in John the Baptist—‘More than a prophet’ because a prophet twice born—as giving important data from which to draw conclusions.
“Christ Himself had said, in unmistakable language: ‘If ye will receive it, this is Elijah which was for to come.... And they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed.’ These clear statements, you said, swept away all possibility of explaining John the Baptist as a mere type of Elijah. He was, without doubt, a reincarnation of the great prophet of fire. Elijah, caught away on the banks of the river Jordan, his mission incomplete, reappearing on the same spot more than eight centuries later, to continue his work of ‘turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just.’