“For her sake I had to break off a love affair, not of the most reputable order, with a girl in Hull. I will call her Louise. She was young, beautiful, and devoted to me. On the night of the 26th of August we took our last walk together, and a few minutes before midnight paused on a wooden bridge running across a kind of canal, locally termed a ‘drain.’ We paused on the bridge, listening to the swirling of the current against the wooden piles, and waiting for the stroke of midnight to part forever. In the few minutes interval she repeated sotto voce, Longfellow’s ‘Bridge,’ the words of which, ‘I stood on the bridge at midnight,’ seemed terribly appropriate. After nearly twenty-five years I can never hear that piece recited without feeling a deadly chill, and the whole scene of two souls in agony again rising before me. Well! Midnight struck and we parted; but Louise said: ‘Grant me one favor, the only one that I shall ever ask you on this earth; promise to meet me here twelve months from to-night at this same hour.’ I demurred at first, thinking it would be bad for both of us, and only re-open partially-healed wounds. At last, however, I consented, saying, ‘Well, I will come if I am alive.’ But she said, ‘Say alive or dead.’ I said, ‘Very well, then, we will meet, dead or alive.’
“The next year I was on the spot a few minutes before the time; and, punctual to the stroke of midnight, Louise arrived. By this time I had begun to regret the arrangement I had made; but it was of too solemn a nature to put aside. I therefore kept the appointment; but said that I did not care to renew the compact. Louise, however, persuaded me to renew it for one more year; and I consented, much against my will; and we again left each other, repeating the same formula, ‘Dead or Alive.’
“The next year after passed rapidly until the first week in July, when I was shot dangerously in the thigh by a fisherman named Thomas Piles, of Hull, a reputed smuggler. A party of four of us had hired his ten-ton yawl to go yachting round the Yorkshire coast, and amuse ourselves by shooting sea-birds amongst the millions of them at Flamborough Head. The third or fourth day out I was shot in the right thigh by the skipper Piles; and the day after, one and a quarter ounce of number 2 shot were cut out therefrom by the coastguard surgeon at Bridlington Quay (whose name I forget for the moment), assisted by Dr. Alexander Mackey, at the Black Lion hotel. The affair was in all the papers at the time, about a column of it appearing in the Eastern Morning News, of Hull.
“As soon as I was able to be removed (two or three weeks) I was taken home, where Dr. Melburne King, of Hull, attended me. The day—and the night—(the 26th of August) came. I was then unable to walk without crutches, and that for only a short distance, so had to be wheeled about in a Bath chair. The distance to the trysting place being rather long, and the time and the circumstances being very peculiar, I did not avail myself of the services of my usual attendant, but specially retained an old servant of the family, who frequently did confidential commissions for me, and who knew Miss Louise well. We set forth ‘without beat of drum’ and arrived at the bridge about a few minutes to midnight. I remember that it was a brilliant starlight night, but I do not think that there was any moon—at all events, at that hour. ‘Old Bob,’ as he was always affectionately called, wheeled me to the bridge, helped me out of the Bath chair, and gave me my crutch. I walked on to the bridge, and leaned my back against the white painted rail top, then lighted my briar-root, and had a comfortable smoke.
“I was very much annoyed that I had allowed myself to be persuaded to come a second time, and determined to tell Louise positively that this should be our last meeting. Besides, now, I did not consider it fair to Miss K., with whom I was again ‘negotiating.’ So, if anything, it was in rather a sulky frame of mind that I awaited Louise. Just as the quarters before the hour began to chime I distinctly heard the ‘clink, clink’ of the little brass heels, which she always wore, sounding on the long flagged causeway, leading for 200 yards up to the bridge. As she got nearer, I could see her pass lamp after lamp in rapid succession, while the strokes of the large clock at Hull resounded through the stilly night.
“At last the patter, patter of the tiny feet sounded on the woodwork of the bridge, and I saw her distinctly pass under the lamp at my side. When she got close to me I saw that she had neither hat nor cape on, and concluded that she had taken a cab at the further end of the flagged causeway, and (it being a very warm night) had left her wraps in the cab, and, for purposes of effect, had come the short distance in evening dress.
“‘Clink, clink,’ went the brass heels, and she seemed about passing me, when I suddenly, urged by an impulse of affection, stretched out my arms to receive her. She passed through them, intangible, impalpable, and as she looked at me I distinctly saw her lips move, and form the words ‘Dead or Alive.’ I even heard the words, but not with my outward ears, with something else, some other sense—what, I know not. I felt startled, surprised, but not afraid, until a moment afterwards, when I felt, but could not see, some other presence following her. I could feel, though I could not hear, the heavy, clumsy thud of feet following her; and my blood seemed turned to ice. Recovering myself with an effort, I shouted out to Old Bob, who was safely ensconsed with the Bath chair in a nook out of sight round the corner: ‘Bob, who passed you just now?’ In an instant the old Yorkshire-man was by my side. ‘Ne’er a one passed me, sir.’ ‘Nonsense, Bob,’ I replied, ‘I told you that I was coming to meet Miss Louise, and she just passed me on the bridge, and must have passed you, because there is no where else she could go. You don’t mean to tell me you didn’t see her?’ The old man replied solemnly: ‘Maister Rob, there’s something uncanny about it. I heered her come on the bridge, and off it, and I knaw them clickety heels onywhere! but I’m domned, sir, if she passed me! I’m thinking we’d better gang.’ And ‘gang’ we did; and it was the small hours of the morning (getting daylight) before we left off talking over the affair, and went to bed.
“The next day I made inquiries from Louise’s family about her, and ascertained that she had died in Liverpool three months previously, being apparently delirious for a few hours before her death, and, our parting compact evidently weighing on her mind, as she kept repeating, ‘Dead or Alive—shall I be there?’—to the utter bewilderment of her friends, who could not divine her meaning—being, of course, entirely unaware of our agreement.”
This completes the examples of the so-called “Pact” cases. In the following example, the phantasmal form conveyed a piece of information to the percipient which he could not well have known by any normal means.