IN WHICH THE WITCHES ASSEMBLE.
A few minutes later she glided into the study, overthrowing a small
table, round which her little _séances_ were accustomed to be made, and
which the doctor had providently placed against the door.
Aunt Dinah held under her arm the 8vo “Revelations of Elihu Bung, the
Pennsylvanian Prophet,” a contribution to spiritual science which
distanced all contemporary competition; and the chapter which shows that
a table of a light, smart build, after having served a proper
apprenticeship to ‘rapping,’ may acquire the faculty of locomotion and
self-direction, flashed on her recollection as she recognised prostrate
at her feet, in the glimmer of her taper, the altar of their mysteries,
which she had with reverent hands herself placed that evening in its
wonted corner, at the opposite end of the room.
Such a manifestation was new to her. She looked on it, a little paler
than usual, and bethought her of that other terrible chapter in which
Elihu Bung avers that spirits, grown intimate by a long familiarity,
will, in a properly regulated twilight—and her light at the moment was
no more—make themselves visible to those whom they habitually favour
with their advices.
Therefore she was strangely thrilled at sight of the indistinct and
shadowy doctor, who, awakened by the noise, rose at the opposite end of
the room from the sofa on which he had fallen asleep. Tall and thin, and
quite unrecognisable by him, was the white figure at the door, with a
taper elevated above its head, and which whispered with a horrid
distinctness the word “Henbane!”—the first heard on his awakening, the
last in his fancy as he dropped asleep, and which sounded to him like
the apparition’s considerate announcement of its name on entering the
room; he echoed “Henbane” in a suppressed diapason, and Aunt Dinah, with
an awful ejaculation, repeated the word from the distance, and sank into
a chair.
“Henbane!” cried the doctor briskly, having no other exclamation ready
and reassured by these evidences of timidity in the spectre, he
exclaimed, “Hey, by Jove! what the plague!” and for some seconds he did
not know distinctly where he was.
“Merciful goodness! Doctor Drake, why _will_ you try to frighten people
in this manner? Do you want to _kill_ me, Sir?”
“I? Ho! Ha, ha! Ma’am,” replied the learned gentleman, incoherently.
“What are you doing _here_, Sir? I think you’re mad!” exclaimed Aunt
Dinah, fiercely.
The doctor cleared his voice, and addressed himself to explain, and
before his first period was reached, William and old Winnie, wofully
sleepy, had arrived.
Luckily the person who approaches such oracles as “Henbane,” it is well
known, must do so with a peaceful and charitable soul. So Miss Perfect
was appeasable, and apologies being made and accepted, she thus opened
her mind to the doctor—
“I don’t complain, Doctor Drake—William, light the candles over the
chimney-piece—although you terrified me a great deal more than in my
circumstances I ought to have been capable of.”
The candles were now lighted, and shone cheerfully upon the short, fat
figure, and ruddy, roguish face of Doctor Drake, and as he was taking
one of his huge pinches of snuff, she added—
“And I won’t deny that I _did_ fancy for a moment you might be a
spirit-form, and possibly that of Henbane.”
William Maubray, who was looking at the doctor, as Miss Perfect
reverently lowered her voice at these words, exploded into something so
like a laugh, though he tried to pass it off for a cough, that his aunt
looked sharply on him in silence for a moment.
“And I’m blowed but I was a bit frightened too, Ma’am, when I saw you at
the door there,” said the doctor.
“Well, let us try,” said Miss Perfect. “Come, we are four; let us try
who are present—what spirits, and seek to communicate. You don’t object,
Dr. Drake?”
“I? Ho! oh! dear no. I should not desire better—aw-haw—_instruction_,
Ma’am,” answered the doctor.
I am afraid he was near saying “fun.”
“Winnie, place the table as usual. There, yes. Now let us arrange
ourselves.”
The doctor sat down, still blinking, and with a great yawn inquired—
“Do we waw—haw—wa—w—want any particular information?”
“Let us first try whether they will communicate. We _always_ want
information,” said Miss Perfect. “William, sit you there; Winnie,
_there_. I’ll take pencil and paper and record.”
All being prepared, fingers extended, company intent, Aunt Dinah
propounded the first question—
“Is there any spirit present?”
There was a long wait and no rejoinder.
“Didn’t you hear something?” inquired the doctor.
William shook his head.
“I thought I _felt_ it,” persisted the doctor. “What do _you_ say,
Ma’am?” addressing himself to Winnie, who looked, after her wont,
towards her mistress for help.
“Did you feel anything?” demanded Miss Perfect, sharply.
“Nothing but a little wind like on the back of my head, as I think,”
replied Winnie, driven to the wall.
“Wind on her head! That’s odd,” said Miss Perfect, looking in the air as
if she possessed the porcine gift of seeing it, “_very_ odd!” she
continued, with her small hand expanded in the air. “Not a breath
stirring, and Winnie has no more imagination than that sofa pillow. You
never fancy anything, Winnie?”
“Do I, Ma’am?” inquired Winnie Dobbs, mildly.
“Well, _do_ you, I say? No, you don’t; of course you don’t. You know you
don’t as well as I do.”
“Well, I did think so, sure, Ma’am,” answered Winnie.
“Pity we can’t get an answer,” remarked the doctor, and at the same
moment William felt the pressure of a large foot in a slipper—under the
table. It had the air of an intentional squeeze, and he looked
innocently at the doctor, who was, however, so entirely unconscious,
that it must have been an accident.
“I say it _is_ a pity, Mr. Maubray, isn’t it? for we _might_ hear
something that might interest Miss Perfect very much, possibly, I say?”
“I don’t know; I can’t say. I’ve never heard anything,” answered
William, who would have liked to kick the table up to the ceiling and go
off to bed.
“Suppose Ma’am, we try again,” inquired Doctor Drake.
“Certainly,” replied Aunt Dinah; “we must have patience.”
“Will you ask, Ma’am, please, again if there’s a spirit in the room?”
solicited the doctor; and the question being put, there came an upward
heave of the table.
“Well!” exclaimed the doctor, looking at Winnie, “did you feel that?”
“Tilt, Ma’am,” said Winnie, who knew the intelligence would be welcome.
“What do _you_ say?” inquired Miss Perfect triumphantly of William.
“Doctor Drake was changing his position just at the moment, and I
perceived no other motion in the table—nothing but the little push he
gave it,” answered William.
“Oh, pooh! yes, of course, there was that,” said the doctor a little
crossly; “but I meant a sort of a start—a crack like, in the leaf of the
table.”
“I felt nothing of the kind,” said William Maubray.
The doctor looked disgusted, and leaning back took a large pinch of
snuff. There was a silence. Aunt Dinah’s lips were closed with a
thoughtful frown as she looked down upon the top of the table.
“It is very strange. I certainly never witnessed in this house more
unequivocal evidences—_preliminary_ evidences, of course—of spiritual
activity.”
“I think, Ma’am, I have read,” said the doctor, with his hands in his
pockets, “I _think_, somewhere, that if anyone of the manipulators
happens to be an unbeliever⸺”
“An unbeliever in the manifestations, of course the spirits won’t
communicate,” interrupted Miss Perfect, volubly laying down the law.
“Winnie is a believer as much as I. We all know _that_. Nephew, how are
you? Do you _believe_? You shake your head. Speak out. Yes or no?”
“Well, I don’t,” said he, a little sheepishly.
“You don’t? And, not believing, you sit here with your fingers on the
table, keeping Doctor Drake out of his—his⸺”
She could not say bed, and the doctor relieved her by saying, “Oh, as to
me, Ma’am, I’m only too happy; but you know it’s a pity, all the same.”
“Very true, doctor. Much obliged. We shall set it to rights. My dear
William, you might have told us at starting; but we’ll commence again.
Sit by the fire, William, and I trust in a little time you may be
convinced.”
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