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.