In Castle Perilous - Page 2

to the magnetic environment."

"Then you do not suffer at all from aphasia just now?"

"Not a touch of it at this moment, thank you; but, as a rule, we all do suffer horribly. This accounts for everything that you embodied spirits find remarkable and enigmatic in our conduct. We mean something, straight enough; but our failure is in expression. Just think how often you go wrong yourselves, though your spirits have a brain to play on, like the musician with a piano. Now we have to do as well as we can without any such mechanical advantage as a brain of cellular tissue"--here he suddenly took the form of a white lady with a black sack over her head, and disappeared in the wainscot.

"Excuse me," he said a moment afterwards, quite in his ordinary voice, "I had a touch of it, I fancy. I lost the thread of my argument, and am dimly conscious of having expressed myself in some unusual and more or less incoherent fashion. I hope it was nothing at all vulgar or distressing?"

"Nothing out of the way in haunted houses, I assure you," I replied, "merely a white lady with a black sack over her head."

"Oh, that was it," he answered with a sigh; "I often am afflicted in that way. Don't mind me if I turn into a luminous boy, or a very old man in chains, or a lady in a green gown and high-heeled shoes, or a headless horseman, or a Mauth hound, or anything of that sort. They are all quite imperfect expressions of our nature,--symptoms, in short, of the malady I mentioned."

"Then the appalling manifestations to which you allude are not the apparitions of the essential ghost? It is not in those forms that he appears among his friends?"

"Certainly not," said the spectre; "and it would be very promotive of good feeling between men and disembodied spirits if this were more generally known. I myself--"

Here he was interrupted by an attack of spirit rappings. A brisk series of sharp faint taps, of a kind I never heard before, resounded from all the furniture of the room. {265} While the disturbance continued, the spectre drummed nervously with his fingers on his knee. The sounds ended as suddenly as they had begun, and he expressed his regrets. "It is a thing I am subject to," he remarked; "nervous, I believe, but, to persons unaccustomed to it, alarming."

"It is rather alarming," I admitted.

"A mere fit of sneezing," he went on; "but you are now able to judge, from the events of to-night, how extremely hard it is for us, with the best intentions, to communicate coherently with the embodied world. Why, there is the Puddifant ghost--in Lord Puddifant's family, you know: he has been trying for generations to inform his descendants that the drainage of the castle is execrable. Yet he can never come nearer what