"Don"t be alarmed! Mrs. Harris is only pa.s.sing into a sleep. Not a word, Harris!" I said, warningly. "Please move farther away."
In the dusky light the faces of all the women looked suddenly blanched and strange as the entranced woman seized upon the table with her hands, shaking it hard from side to side. The table seemed to wake to diabolic energy under her palms. This was an unexpected development, and I was almost as much surprised as the others were.
"Sing again," I commanded, softly.
As they sang, Mrs. Harris withdrew her hands from the table and sat rigidly erect, yet with a peaceful look upon her face. "She does it well," I thought. "I didn"t think it in the quiet little lady." At length one hand lifted and dropped limply upon the table. "It wants to write," said I. "Where is the pad? I have a pencil."
As I put a pencil under the hand, it was seized in a very singular way, and almost instantly Mrs. Cameron gasped, "That"s very strange!"
"Hush!" said I. "Wait!"
Holding the pencil clumsily as a crippled person might do, the hand crept over the paper, and at last, after writing several lines, stopped and lay laxly open. I pa.s.sed the pad to Brierly. "Read it aloud," I said.
He took it to the light and read:
"Sara, be not sceptical. Believe and you will be happier. Life is only the minutest segment of the great circle.
MARTIN."
"My father!" exclaimed Mrs. Cameron. "Let me see the writing." Brierly handed the pad to her. She stared upon it in awe and wonder. "It is his exact signature--and Dolly held the pen just as he did--he was paralyzed toward the last--and could only write by holding his pen that way."
"Look! it"s moving again," I exclaimed.
The hand caught up the pencil, and, holding it between the thumb and forefinger in a peculiar way, began moving it in the air. Brierly, who sat opposite, translated these movements. "She is drawing, free-hand, in the air. She is sketching the outline of a boat. See how she measures and plumbs her lines! Are you addressing me?" he asked of Mrs. Harris.
The sleeper nodded.
"Can"t you write?" I asked. "Can"t you speak?"
A low gurgle in the throat was the only answer at the moment, but after a few trials a husky whisper began to be heard. "I will try," she said, and suddenly began to chuckle, rolling upon one hip and throwing one foot over the other like a man taking an easy att.i.tude. She now held the pencil as if it were a cigarette, laughing again with such generous tone that the other women recoiled. Then she spoke, huskily. "You know--San Remo--Sands," came brokenly from her lips.
"Sands?" queried the painter; "who is Sands?"
"Sands--San Remo--boats."
The painter was puzzled. "I don"t remember any Sands at San Remo. It must be some student I knew in Paris. Is that what you mean?"
Mrs. Harris violently nodded. As abruptly as it came, this action left her, and then slowly, imperceptibly, her expression changed, a look of ineffable maternal sweetness came into her face; she seemed to cradle a tiny babe upon her arm. At last she sighed, "Oh, the pity of it, the pity of it!"
For a minute we sat in silence, so compelling were her gestures and her tone. At last I asked, "Has any one here lost a little child?"
Mrs. Cameron spoke, hesitatingly, "Yes--I lost a little baby--years ago."
"She is addressing you--perhaps."
Mrs. Harris did not respond to this suggestion, but changed into an impersonation of a rollicking girl of rather common fibre. "h.e.l.lo, Sally!" she cried out, and Mrs. Cameron stared at her in blank dismay as she asked, "Are you talking to me?"
"You bet I am, you old bag o" wool. Remember Geny? Remember the night on the door-step? Ooo! but it was cold! _You_ were to blame."
"What is she talking about?" I asked, seeing that Mrs. Cameron was reluctant to answer this challenge.
"She seems to be impersonating an old cla.s.s-mate of mine at college--"
"That"s what!" broke in the voice.
Mrs. Cameron went on, "Her name was Eugenia Hull--"
"Is yet," laughed the voice. "Same old sport. Couldn"t find any man good enough. You didn"t like me, but no matter; I want to tell you that you"re in danger of fire. Don"t play with fire. Be careful of fire--"
Again a calm blankness fell upon the psychic"s delicate and sensitive face, and the hand once more slowly closed upon the pencil.
"My father again!" exclaimed Mrs. Cameron. "How could Dolly have known that he held his pen in just that way? She never saw him."
"Do not place too much value on such performances," I cautioned. "She has probably heard you describe it. Or she might have taken it out of your subconscious mind."
The pencil dropped. The hand lifted. The form of the sleeper expanded with power. Her face took on benignity and lofty serenity. She rose slowly, impressively, and with her hand upraised in a peculiar gesture, laid a blessing upon the head of her hostess. There was so much of sweetness and tolerance in her face, so much of dignity and power in every movement that I was moved to applaud the actress. As we all sat thus, deeply impressed by her towering att.i.tude, Mrs. Cameron whispered: "Why, it is Bishop Blank! That is exactly the way he held his hand--his robe!"
"Is it the bishop?" I asked.
The psychic bowed and in solemn answer spoke. "Tell James all will yet be well," she said, and, making the sign of blessing once more, sank back into her chair.
Meanwhile the irreverent ribalds in the far end of the room were disturbing the solemnity of all this communion with the shades, and at my suggestion we went up-stairs to Mrs. Cameron"s own sitting-room, where we could be quiet. Seizing a moment when Mrs. Harris was free from the "influence," I woke her and told her what we were about to do. She followed Mrs. Cameron readily, although she seemed a little dazed, and five of us continued the sitting, with Mrs. Quigg and Cameron looking on with perfectly evident doubt of our psychic"s sincerity. Harris was rigidly excluded.
In the quiet of this room Mrs. Harris pa.s.sed almost immediately into trance--or what seemed like a trance--and ran swiftly over all her former impersonations. Voice succeeded voice, almost without pause. The sweet mother with the child, the painter of San Remo, the jovial and slangy girl, the commanding and majestic figure of the bishop--all returned repeatedly, in bewildering mixture, dropping away, one after the other, with disappointing suddenness. And yet each time the messages grew a little more definite, a little more coherent, until at last they all cleared up, and this _in opposition to our thought, to our first interpretations_. It developed that the painter was not named "Sands,"
but "Felipi," and that he was only trying to tell Brierly that to succeed he should paint rocks and sands and old boats at San Remo.
"Pauline," the woman who had seemed to hold a babe, was a friend of Mrs.
Cameron"s who had died in childbirth. And then swiftly, unaccountably, all these gentle or genial influences were scattered as if by something h.e.l.lish, something diabolic. The face of the sweet little woman became fiendish in line. Her lips snarled, her hands clawed like those of a cat, and out of her mouth came a hoa.r.s.e imprecation. "I"ll tear your heart out!" she snarled. "I"ll kill you soul and body--I"ll rip you limb from limb!" We all recoiled in amazement and wonder. It was as if our friend had suddenly gone insane.
I confess to a feeling of profound astonishment. I had never met Mrs.
Harris before, but as she was an intimate friend of Mrs. Cameron, and quite evidently a woman of culture, I could not think her so practised a joker as to be "putting all this on."
While still we sat in silence, another voice uttered a wail of infinite terror and despair. "I didn"t do it! _Don"t_ kill me! It was not _my_ work." And then, still more horrible to hear, a sound like the gurgling of blood came from the psychic"s lips, mixed with babbled, frantic, incoherent words. I had a perfectly definite impression that she was impersonating some one with his throat cut. Her grimaces were disgusting and terrifying. The women shivered with horror. A few seconds later and her face changed; the hideous mask became white, expressing rigid, exalted terror. Her arms were drawn back as if tied at the elbow behind her back. Her head was uplifted, and in a low, monotonous, hushed voice she prayed: "Lord Jesus, receive--"
A gasping, gurgling cry cut short her prayer, and, with tongue protruding from her mouth, she presented such a picture of a strangling woman that a sudden clear conception of what it all meant came to me.
"She"s impersonating a woman on the scaffold," I explained. "She has shown us a murder, and now she is depicting an execution. Is it Mrs. R., of Vermont?" I asked.
She nodded slowly. "Save me!" she whispered.
"Waken her, please. Don"t let her do that any more," pleaded Mrs.
Cameron, in poignant distress.
Thereupon I called out, sharply: "That is enough! Wake! _Wake!_"
In answer to my command she ceased to groan; her face smoothed out, and with a bewildered smile she opened her eyes. "What are you saying? Have I been asleep?"
"You have, indeed," I replied, "and you"ve disclosed a deal of dubious family history. How do you feel?"
"I feel very funny around my neck," she answered, wonderingly. "What have you been doing to me?" She rubbed her throat. "My neck feels as if it had a band round it, and my tongue seems swollen. What have you been about?"