The story was well told, and perfectly credible. Miss Greenlow could not resist pointing out how entirely it annihilated my vision. No suicide!--no knife!--no rush up the staircase!--nothing, in fact, that might not have been, and, of course, _must have been_ a mere freak of imagination during my troubled sleep. In the face of Küntze's quiet and detailed statement I could only agree with her, and so the matter rested for some months. The poor woman meanwhile remained in the hospital, and her son and daughter were telegraphed for from Paris. We found them at the hotel on our return there, three weeks later, from Moscow. There was then some slight hope of ultimate recovery, but within six or seven weeks from the "accident" the unfortunate woman died from shock and exhaustion.
From Russia we returned to Stockholm and Christiania, where Miss Greenlow took the steamer for Hull, and I went up into the Dovre Feld Mountains to join a Swedish friend, already mentioned in my chapter on India.
I told her my story of the poor French _modiste_ and her sad and painful accident, also about my curiously vivid and yet inaccurate vision, and we discussed the latter in quite an S.P.R. spirit! We were then in a very remote part of the Dovre Feld, where foreign papers were practically inaccessible.
I had left my friend in Norway, and returned to England a week or two before receiving a very interesting letter from her.
In it she said: "I have just got hold of some French papers, and I see that poor woman you told me about, has just died in Petersburg, and the real story has now come out.
"It seems that it _was_ suicide after all, so your vision was quite true!
"She had received large sums in advance for commissions from some of the Russian nobility, and had either spent or speculated with them. That was why she had to invent the story of an embezzling manager, to cover her own shortcomings. But the truth was leaking out in spite of her endeavours, and she made up her mind to commit suicide rather than face the horrors of a Russian prison. The paper goes on to say that she chose a most terrible death, little realising what the torture would be. It seems that she waited till the middle of the night you described, and then covered her whole body with oil, and set fire to it! This accounts, of course, for the horrible shrieks you heard. In her awful agony she seized a knife--that she had either secreted or found in her room--rushed out into the passage in a blaze, and when the musjig tried to stop her, she ran from him, and attempted to stab herself as she made her way up the stairs. All this you seem to have seen accurately; also the fact that the musjig pursued her and succeeded in wrenching the knife from her hands before she had injured herself with it. The paper mentions that a Russian gentleman had gone to the rescue when he heard the shrieks, but this was before she had got hold of the knife, and it was the musjig alone who saved her, in the end, from immediate death."