“Don’t speak yet, Hugo,” whispered Alice anxiously. “Don’t, till you feel stronger.”
But I could not control my impatience.
“How am I here?” I asked. “Ah, I remember. I lost my way in the old forest.... Ah, yes; I recollect now all.... The cold biting wind, my lame foot, after I stumbled and fell, knocking my head against a stone, and all became a blank to me!”
“Hush, Hugo, hush my boy,” said my mother wiping tears of joy from her still pale and suffering face. “You will tell us all that presently.... Now rest.”
But I could not refrain from speaking, as thoughts crowded into my head, and recollections came vividly back. “No, no, I am better,” I went on. “I am strong again, and I must let you know all that I dreamed. I was here, and I saw you all.... Oh, the torture I suffered when you knew me not!... Mother, darling, did you not see me, your son? But she, my Alice, saw and followed me, and it is she who saved me from death! Ah, yes! I remember now, you found my body, and then all was darkness again. Kiss me, mother! Kiss me all, let me feel that I am really with you in body, and am no longer an invisible shadow.... Mother I kept my promise; I am here on Christmas Eve! Light the tree, my little Fan, and give me the pipe with the bells I saw you holding, and heard you say it was for old brother Hugo.”
The child ran into the other room and returned with the pipe I had seen her playing with a few hours before. This was the greatest and final proof for me, as for my family. The event was no vision then, no hallucination, but true to its merest details! As my mother often said afterwards, referring to that wonderful night, it was a weird and strange experience, but one which had happened to others before, and will go on happening from time to time. Of late years, when I had been happily married to my Alice (who will not let me travel far away without her, any longer) I have dived a good deal into such psychic mysteries, and I think I can explain my experience. I think that by privation, cold, and mental agony, I had been thrown into such abnormal conditions, that my astral body, as it is now generally called, my “conscious self,” was able to escape from the physical tenement and take itself to the home I so passionately desired to reach. All my thoughts, and longings being intensely directed towards it, I found myself there where I wished to be, in spirit. Then the agony of mind from the consciousness that I was invisible to all, added to the fear of death unless I could impress them with my presence, became finally productive of the supreme effort of will, the success of which alone could save me. This joined to Alice’s sensitiveness and her love for me, enabled her to sense my presence, and even to see my form, whereas others saw nothing. Man is a wonderful and marvellous enigma; but it is one which has to, and will, be completely unriddled some day, the scepticism of the age notwithstanding.
Such is the simple story told to the writer by an old naval officer, about the most “memorable Christmas Eve” that came within his own experience.
Constance Wachtmeister.
