“Yes! Red Cloud is not very good at materialisations. Perhaps we don’t give him the proper sort of power. But his lights are excellent.”
Several more had broken out. They were of different types, slow-moving clouds and little dancing sparks like glowworms. At the same time both visitors were conscious of a cold wind which blew upon their faces. It was no delusion, for Enid felt her hair stream across her forehead.
“You feel the rushing wind,” said Mailey. “Some of these lights would pass for tongues of fire, would they not? Pentecost does not seem such a very remote or impossible thing, does it?”
The tambourine had risen in the air, and the dot of luminous paint showed that it was circling round. Presently it descended and touched their heads each in turn. Then with a jingle it quivered down upon the table.
“Why a tambourine? It seems always to be a tambourine,” remarked Malone.
“It is a convenient little instrument,” Mailey explained. “The only one which shows automatically by its noise where it is flying. I don’t know what other I could suggest except a musical-box.”
“Our box here flies round something amazin’,” said Mrs. Bolsover. “It thinks nothing of winding itself up in the air as it flies. It’s a heavy box, too.”
“Nine pounds,” said Bolsover. “Well, we seem to have got to the end of things. I don’t think we shall get much more to-night. It has not been a bad sitting—what I should call a fair average sitting. We must wait a little before we turn on the light. Well, Mr. Malone, what do you think of it? Let’s have any objections now before we part. That’s the worst of you inquirers, you know. You often bottle things up in your own mind and let them loose afterwards, when it would have been easy to settle it at the time. Very nice and polite to our faces, and then we are a gang of swindlers in the report.”
Malone’s head was throbbing and he passed his hand over his heated brow.
“I am confused,” he said, “but impressed. Oh, yes, certainly impressed. I’ve read of these things, but it is very different when you see them. What weighs most with me is the obvious sincerity and sanity of all you people. No one could doubt that.”