"'Was my Eve indeed dead?' I asked of myself; 'and was it her intellectual spirit, her pure essence, that imperishable something engendered in us all from a higher source, that followed me as a guardian angel?' I remembered her parting words. The idea suggested was sadly sweet and terrible; and so, as a sense of her perpetual presence as a spirit-wife hovered at all times about me, controlling all my actions, rendered me unfit for society, till at Calcutta, a crisis was put to all this.
"With some of the 72nd, and other Europeans who had escaped from Neemuch, or had 'distinguished themselves,' as the 'Hurkaru' had it, I once went to be photographed at the famous studio near the corner of the Strand. I sat, in succession, alone and in a group, after being posed in the usual fashion, with an iron hoop at the nape of my neck. On examining the first negative, an expression of perplexity and astonishment came over the face of the artist.
"'Strange, sir,' said he; 'most unaccountable!'
"'What is strange; what is unaccountable?' asked several.
"'Another figure that is not in the room appears at Captain Arkley's back—a woman, by Jove!' he replied, placing the glass over a piece of black velvet; and there—there—oh, there could be no doubt of it—was faintly indicated the outline of one whose face and form had been but too vividly impressed on my heart and brain, bending sorrowfully over me, with her soft, bright eyes and wealth of long bright hair.
"From my hand the glass fell on the floor, and was shivered to atoms. A similar figure hovering near me, was visible among the pictured group of officers, but faded out. I refused to sit again, and quitted the studio in utter confusion, and with nerves dreadfully shaken, though my comrades averred that a trick had been played upon me. If so, how was the figure that of my dream—that of my lost love—who, a letter soon after informed me, had burst a blood-vessel, and expired on the night of the 3rd June, with my name on her lips?"
Such was the story of Jack Arkley. Whether it was false or true, in this age of spiritualism and many other isms of mediums with the world unseen, and in which Enemoser has ventilated his theory of polarity, I pretend not to say, and leave others to determine. He became a moody monomaniac. I rejoined my regiment, and from that time never saw my old chum again. The last that I heard of him was, that he had quitted the service, and died a Passionist Father, in one of the many new monastic institutions that exist in the great metropolis.
THE SPECTRE HAND.
Do the dead ever revisit this earth?