"Do you know whose cane this is?"
"Yes."
"Will you tell us?"
Up to that time the replies had come easily and quickly. But beginning with the cane question, the medium was in difficulties. She moved uneasily, and spoke irritably. The replies were slow and grudging.
Foreign subjects were introduced, as now.
"Horace"s wife certainly bullies him," said the voice. "He"s afraid of her. And the fire-tongs--the fire-tongs--the fire-tongs!"
"Whose cane is this?" Herbert repeated.
"Mr. Ellingham"s."
This created a profound sensation.
"How do you know that?"
"He carried it at the seash.o.r.e. He wrote in the sand with it."
"What did he write?"
"Ten o"clock."
"He wrote "ten o"clock" in the sand, and the waves came and washed it away?"
"Yes."
"Horace," said my wife, leaning forward, "why not ask her about that stock of mine? If it is going down, I ought to sell, oughtn"t I?"
Herbert eyed her with some exasperation.
"We are here to make a serious investigation," he said. "If the members of the club will keep their attention on what we are doing, we may get somewhere. Now," to the medium, "the man is dead, and the revolver is beside him. Did he kill himself?"
"No. He attacked her when he found the letters."
"And she shot him?"
"I can"t tell you that."
"Try very hard. It is important."
"I don"t know," was the fretful reply. "She may have. She hated him. I don"t know. She says she did."
"She says she killed him?"
But there was no reply to this, although Herbert repeated it several times.
Instead, the voice of the "control" began to recite a verse of poetry--a cheap, sentimental bit of trash. It was maddening, under the circ.u.mstances.
"Do you know where the letters are?"
"Hawkins has them."
"They were not hidden in the curtain?" This was Sperry.
"No. The police might have searched the room."
"Where were these letters?"
There was no direct reply to this, but instead:
"He found them when he was looking for his razorstrop. They were in the top of a closet. His revolver was there, too. He went back and got it.
It was terrible."
There was a profound silence, followed by a slight exclamation from Sperry as he leaped to his feet. The screen at the end of the room, which cut off the light from Clara"s candle, was toppling. The next instant it fell, and we saw Clara sprawled over her table, in a dead faint.
XI
In this, the final chapter of the record of these seances, I shall give, as briefly as possible, the events of the day following the third sitting. I shall explain the mystery of Arthur Wells"s death, and I shall give the solution arrived at by the Neighborhood Club as to the strange communications from the medium, Miss Jeremy, now Sperry"s wife.
But there are some things I cannot explain. Do our spirits live on, on this earth plane, now and then obedient to the wills of those yet living? Is death, then, only a gateway into higher s.p.a.ce, from which, through the open door of a "sensitive" mind, we may be brought back on occasion to commit the inadequate absurdities of the physical seance?
Or is Sperry right, and do certain individuals manifest powers of a purely physical nature, but powers which Sperry characterizes as the survival of some long-lost development by which at one time we knew how to liberate a forgotten form of energy?
Who can say? We do not know. We have had to accept these things as they have been accepted through the ages, and give them either a spiritual or a purely natural explanation, as our minds happen to be adventurous or a.n.a.lytic in type.
But outside of the purely physical phenomena of those seances, we are provided with an explanation which satisfies the Neighborhood Club, even if it fails to satisfy the convinced spiritist. We have been accused merely of subst.i.tuting one mystery for another, but I reply by saying that the mystery we subst.i.tute is not a mystery, but an acknowledged fact.
On Tuesday morning I wakened after an uneasy night. I knew certain things, knew them definitely in the clear light of morning. Hawkins had the letters that Arthur Wells had found; that was one thing. I had not taken Ellingham"s stick to Mrs. Dane"s house; that was another. I had not done it. I had placed it on the table and had not touched it again.
But those were immaterial, compared with one outstanding fact. Any supernatural solution would imply full knowledge by whatever power had controlled the medium. And there was not full knowledge. There was, on the contrary, a definite place beyond which the medium could not go.
She did not know who had killed Arthur Wells.
To my surprise, Sperry and Herbert Robinson came together to see me that morning at my office. Sperry, like myself, was pale and tired, but Herbert was restless and talkative, for all the world like a terrier on the scent of a rat.
They had brought a newspaper account of an attempt by burglars to rob the Wells house, and the usual police formula that arrests were expected to be made that day. There was a diagram of the house, and a picture of the kitchen door, with an arrow indicating the bullet-hole.
"Hawkins will be here soon," Sperry said, rather casually, after I had read the clipping.
"Here?"
"Yes. He is bringing a letter from Miss Jeremy. The letter is merely a blind. We want to see him."