‘There it is,’ she said, ‘the white soul; it kneels at the foot of the bed.’
The husband said nothing, but following the direction of his wife’s hand, he solemnly bid the apparition depart, in the name of the Most Holy Trinity and the Madonna.
Though he had seen nothing, he, too, now heard a voice, and the voice said that it was her father whom the wife had seen; that it was not well that they should have in the house the woman whom they had taken in to board, for that it was on her account he was now suffering penance. ‘Think of this,’ he said, finally, ‘for I cannot stay to tell you more; for it is the hour of prayer.’[4]
The lighting up of a masked ball could not be compared to the brightness[5] which filled the room as the spirit disappeared. And this the husband saw well, though he had not seen the soul.
The husband and wife thought a good deal of what they had heard; they had never known before of the father’s intimacy with this woman, but they inquired, and found it was even so.
Then the man took into his head to go to one of these new people, what do they call it? spiritismo, magnetismo,[6] or whatever it is. He made them call up the spirit of his wife’s father, and he asked if it was he who had appeared at night in the bedroom all the month through, and he said, ‘yes, that it was.’ And he asked him about all the particulars, and he confirmed them all. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘if indeed it was you, give me some sign to-night;’ and he said he would.
There was a ruler in the chest of drawers in the bedroom, and all through the night there were knocks; now on the ceiling, now on the floor, now on the walls, as if given with that ruler, and we know those ‘spiritismo’ people say the spirits make themselves understood by knocking.
After that, they sent away their boarder, though at considerable pecuniary loss.
[‘I know a story like that,’ said the first man, ‘and a true one too; it happened in 1848 or 1849.’]