Not long after she had begun to wear the quaint little chain which had lain for so many centuries round the throat of the dead Egyptian, its new owner was distressed and alarmed by a persistent form of nightmare, which gradually induced a feeling that she was haunted by the wraith of a dark-skinned girl, of a type of feature unlike any known to her, but clad in raiment such as she fancied had been worn by Egyptians in the days of the Pharaohs. The apparition was always clothed in the same manner, and though she wore a number of strangely fashioned ornaments, her neck was left completely bare. The girl seemed to be ever present in her dreams, and her face always wore a look of extreme distress, as of one who grieved for the loss of some dearly beloved friend or possession. The curious part of it was, that the dream-girl seemed always to come to the sleeper as to one from whom she could get relief; and while, in her earlier appearances, she had the expression and the manner of a supplicant, the dreamer fancied that latterly there had been a change, and the dark face looked both agonised and threatening.
These visitations, which could not be ascribed to any reasonable cause, had so got on the lady’s nerves that she had gone for change to a villa on the coast of Normandy. The change of scene brought no relief. The haunting form of the Egyptian girl, though not a nightly visitor, was so constantly present, that the dread of seeing her deprived sleep of all power of giving rest, and the poor lady was not only becoming seriously ill, but she was so affected by her uncanny infliction, that she even sometimes imagined she caught glimpses of her tormentor when she herself was wide awake.
One afternoon, the lady was lying in a darkened room, the persiennes closed to keep out the hot and penetrating rays of a summer sun. She felt very weary and despondent, the result of many broken nights and the prolonged strain on her nerves, and, though she held a book in her hand she was all the time wondering how much longer she could bear this oppression, and what she had done to deserve such a weirdly horrible fate. In a dull sort of way she supposed she must be going mad, and felt with grim cynicism that the border-land between sanity and insanity was so narrow that she would hardly realise the moment when she crossed it. There was absolute silence everywhere, except for the faint soothing whisper of the sea, rippling over the sand beneath the wooded bluff on which the villa stood. The air was warm and heavy with summer perfumes; the room was darkening slowly as the sun dipped towards the placid waters of La Manche; the woman was deadly weary, and she slept.
At first her sleep must have been sound; but, after a time, her eyes opened to that other consciousness which is of the world of dreams, and once again she saw her now dreaded companion, the dark-eyed, dark-skinned girl from the land of the Pharaohs. The girl seemed to plead in impassioned terms for something, but the dreamer could not understand the strange words, and racked her brain, as dreamers will, to try to imagine their meaning. The girl burst into a storm of tears, sinking to the ground in her grief and despair, and burying her face on a pile of cushions. Still the dreamer, suffering torture herself, was helpless to relieve the other. Then suddenly the girl sprang up, and, dashing the tears from her eyes, which now seemed to blaze with murderous resolve, she sprang upon the white woman, enlaced her throat with supple brown fingers, pressed and pressed, tighter and tighter—ah, God! the horror and the suffocating pain of it—and all the while the sleeper’s hands seemed tied to her side. Then with a scream the dreamer awoke. She felt her eyes must be starting from her head, and instinctively raised her hands to her throat, only to realise that her vivid sensation of strangulation was merely a nightmare, but that the chain—the string of turquoise beads which she had never unfastened from the day she first put it on—was gone.
There was now little light in the room, only enough to see things vaguely, yet the lady declares that in that first moment of waking she distinctly saw a figure, exactly like that of the girl of her dreams, glide swiftly away from her and pass out through a portière into the verandah. For some time she was too frightened and unnerved to move, but when at last she summoned her people they had seen no one.
The only thing that was real was that she had lost the necklace, and never saw it again. As some compensation she also lost for ever the society of her dream-visitor, and completely recovered her own health.
Now who took my stephanotis?