She stared at him perplexed, and he added:
“You see? One has only to put oneself in the receptive state and time is no more. One sees—one hears. You are only a beginner so I cannot show you much. But you are a beginner or you would not be here in the Shalimar with me now. There is a bond between us which goes back—” He paused, looking keenly at her, and said quickly “Centuries, and further.”
She was stunned, dazed by the revelations. They meant so much more that it is possible to record. Also the sensation was beginning in her which we all know before waking. The dream wavers on its foundation, loosens, becomes misty, makes ready to disappear. It would be gone—gone before she could know. She caught his hand as if to steady it.
“Are you V. Lydiat?” she cried.—“You must be. You are. You come to me every day—a voice. O let me come to you like this, and teach me, teach me, that I may know and see. I am a blind creature in a universe of wonders. Let me come every night.”
His face was receding, palpitating, collapsing, but his voice came as if from something beyond it.
“That is what you call me. Names are nothing. Yes, come every night.”
It was gone. She was in the Shalimar alone, and somewhere in the distance she heard Sidney Verrier’s voice calling clear as a bird. Beatrice Veronica woke that morning with the sun glorying through the eastern arch of her veranda. She was still dressed. She had slept there all night. Of the dream she remembered snatches, hints, which left new hopes and impulses germinating in her soul. The unknown flowers were sown in spring. They would blossom in summer in unimaginable beauty.
That was the beginning of a time of strange and enchanting happiness. Thus one may imagine the joy of a man born blind who by some miraculous means is made to see, and wakes in a world of wonders. It is impossible that anyone should know greater bliss. The very weight of it made her methodical and practical lest a grain of heavenly gold should escape her in its transmutation to earthly terms.
The morning was V. Lydiat’s. At ten o’clock she betook herself to her high veranda, and folding her hands and composing her mind looked out to sea through the wide way of pines which terminated in its azure beauty. Then, as has been told before, it would blow softly away on a dream-wind, and the story begin.
And at night there was now invariably the meeting. At first that was always in some place she knew—somewhere she recognized from memory, haunts of her own with Sidney Verrier. But one night a new thing happened—she woke into dream by the Ganges at Cawnpore, at the terrible Massacre Ghaut, a place she had always avoided because of the horrible memories of the Indian mutiny which sicken the soul of every European who stands there.