I started violently, and sat bolt upright, my hair tingling and every muscle tightened. A dull rapping, like the sound of a hammer upon wood covered with cloth, came from the table. The circle were silent, leaning back in their seats, their hands still joined before them. The medium had sunk down in her chair, her arms extended along the arms of it, so that those next her had to reach out to keep hold of her hands. And above the group I saw, or imagined that I saw, the vaguest conceivable cloudiness in mid-air, like mist on a foggy night or the glimmer seen inside closed eyelids after looking at a brightly lighted window. The more I tried to make sure that I saw it, the more I doubted whether it were not merely imagination. If you hold your spread hand before a dark background, you will seem to see a cloudy blur outlining the fingers; it was like that. The rapping was repeated more loudly, and through the throbbing in my ears and the almost suffocating oppression, I caught myself remembering the scene of the knocking at the gate in Macbeth. Then a voice began to speak: a querulous, throaty contralto that came in jerks and pauses. "Here you are again," it said; "I don't—want to talk—to any of you—I feel trouble—somewhere. Where's mother?"
"That's Miriam," said Professor Shelburgh, in the tone of casual recognition.
I do not know whether it was the shock of the coincident name, or only that the heat and the excitement of the day had reached their natural climax. But I grew suddenly hot and cold in waves; my skin crawled, and I felt at once a strangling hurry of heart-beats and a hollow nausea. For an instant, I set my teeth and tried to master it; but it was no use. I must get out into the open light and air, or I should make an exhibition of myself. I rose and tiptoed hurriedly across the room through an atmosphere that seemed like a heavy liquid, dizzily aware that Maclean had followed me a step or two and that the group around the table looked after me in surprise. Somehow, I found the door-handle. While I groped for my hat in the hallway, I heard the querulous jerky voices speaking again inside the room. And the next moment I was standing on the sun-baked sidewalk, blinking my eyes against the glare, and breathing in deep gulps. A flower-vendor called on the corner, above the distant drone of a hand-organ. Horses clumped heavily past. And a sparrow sat for a second upon the green top of a hydrant, then fluttered away, chattering.
CHAPTER XVIII
DOCTOR REID REMOVES A SOURCE OF INFORMATION
For a block or so I still felt a little queer and giddy; but air and movement soon set all to rights; and after a walk back to the Club and a comfortable bath, I felt as well as ever, and rather wondered at my sudden upset. Evidently it had been only the heat and the nervous excitement of the day; and I had been foolish to take Scotch with my luncheon in such weather. I remembered that I had been out of gear a bit since the morning; Maclean's revelation must have shaken me more than I had admitted to myself; and it only wanted the startling coincidence of a "spirit" called Miriam to cap the climax. Besides, if you sit for two hours in a dark and stuffy room waiting for something strange to happen, something usually will. At any rate I had had an interesting experience. For a moment, it occurred to me that the episode might have been prearranged by Mac, with the idea of conveying to me in that way something which he did not wish to tell; but that was not like him, and was absurdly far-fetched besides. If the name had been taken somehow from my own thoughts, it was a remarkable case of telepathy; but no, it had been the professor, not the medium, who had named the voice; and by his tone, this had been a familiar one often heard before. If the name had any other than a chance connection with my affair, I could not fathom it.
There must be in all of us an instinct for the occult, an affinity for illicit short-cuts through difficulty that comes of mental and moral indolence—the instinct that causes the school-boy to look up the answer to his problem in the back of the book, and sends ignorance running to the soothsayer. Here was I, an educated man with what I hoped was not less than ordinary intelligence, in the grip of a crushing question; and instead of seeking certainty through rational search, I was mulling over a mummery which purported to be a communication from another world. I was no better than a kitchen-maid at her dream-book and fortune-teller. Carucci had said that Lady was secretly Reid's wife—or rather that he had gone through a false form of marriage with her, having already a wife or an entanglement abroad. It was too horrible and too ruinous to all that I most hoped for to be true; it was not like the people concerned; but it was unbearably like all that I knew them to have said and done. I must know what the truth was; and the more I shrank from knowing, the more need for me to understand fully and at once. To sit still and wonder was mere cowardice. I was here to watch Carucci on Mr. Tabor's account: before he should leave the country, I would make it my business to question him on my own.
By the time I had shaken myself into so much common sense, the afternoon was far gone; and after a very early meal, I set out again for the East Side with the strained calmness of a man who walks into the jaws of a crisis to escape the devils that dance with their shadows behind him. There was a mockery of evening freshness in the air, though the heat still poured upward relentlessly from the sun-baked uncleanliness underfoot. The streets were so crowded with the weary turmoil of released workers, that I made my way against the stream with some difficulty; and as I neared my destination the difficulty increased. An eddying mass of humanity filled the narrow sidewalks and overflowed into the street among rumbling drays and trampling, scrambling horses: gangs of workmen with their tools, nervous and preoccupied business men, pallid clerks and stenographers, and droves of factory hands, men and women together, clamoring in a very Babel of languages. I noticed but one other man going toward the waterside—a heavily built fellow with a red handkerchief about his neck, some yards in front of me; and presently, as he turned sidewise to avoid being jostled into a lamp-post, I saw that it was Carucci. There could be no mistake: it was he, in his best clothes apparently, and alone, a dozen blocks from his own street. Sheila was nowhere in sight: however he had become separated from her, with or against her will, it was my business to follow him. Here was my chance for a talk with him alone; and as he passed his own corner and still kept on his way southward, it began to look as if I should be killing two birds with one stone.
I found it no very hard matter to keep him in sight; for the peculiar brightness of the handkerchief at his neck marked him a block away. There were other Italians, to be sure, but none so gorgeously bedecked, nor whose gait was so wondrous a combination of a roll, a stagger, and a strut. To overtake him, however, among that crowd was not so easy; and I was afraid besides that coming suddenly upon him from behind might spoil my whole opportunity by making him angrily suspicious. I followed, accordingly, as best I might, for some distance; and when at last, with a swagger of grimy magnificence, he pushed through a pair of swinging doors, I thought that my chance had arrived. I waited a moment outside, that I might not seem too patently to have followed him; and as I stood there, a precocious small boy came up and looked me over.