The querulous throaty tone was the same, but the words came each time more quickly, and the wail was dying out of them. The comic aspect of the whole scene struck me suddenly with revolting. It was so terribly important and at the same time such a tawdry practical joke.
"Miriam, what are you saying?" Mrs. Tabor was leaning forward toward the sound, her face tense and frightened.
"Oh, anything I please—it's quite easy— Don't you begin to understand?"
"Oh, what do you mean? Miriam! Mrs. Mahl, what is happening?"
The medium never stirred, nor moved a muscle of her face, as the spirit-voice replied: "Just the same thing that's happened right along, Mrs. Tabor. Don't you see now? You were always so sure that any voice could do for you to recognize. You've laid yourself open to it."
Mrs. Tabor looked for the first time as one might who listens to the dead. Her voice frightened me, it was so calm.
"What do you mean?" she said monotonously. I saw Reid move as if to part the curtain, glancing sharply at Doctor Paulus as he did so; but the older man's mouth was a bloodless line, and he shook his great head, whispering: "Not yet, Reid; not yet."
"Listen," said the voice. "Here's what you call Miriam talking." Its tone changed abruptly: "Now here's me. I'm doing it." The medium rose quietly from her chair, and stepped out into the room: "The whole thing's just—a trick," she said, shifting from one voice to the other in alternate phrases. "You believe in—ghosts—and so I gave you—what you believe." She came around the table. "Do you understand now?"
Sheila was sobbing aloud, but none of the others seemed to notice her. Mrs. Tabor sat for an instant as if frozen, staring vacantly in front of her. Then as the medium approached, she shrank away suddenly with a childish cry of fear. "It isn't true!" she cried. "It isn't true!" and she swung limply forward upon the little table, and lay still.
Lady and Mr. Tabor were beside her in an instant, as we three sprang forward into the room. Sheila was on her feet, muttering, "You've killed her, ye brute beasts—" But a look from Doctor Paulus silenced her, as he waved the rest of us back and bent over the unconscious woman, his broad fingers pressed along the slender wrist. For a moment we watched his face in silence, as if it were the very face of destiny. Then the canary gave a sudden shrill scream, and fluttered palpitating into a corner of its cage, beating so violently against the wires that tiny feathers floated loosely out and down. The medium whispered: "Oh, my God!" and cringed sidelong, raising her arms as if one struck at her. And my hair thrilled and my heart sickened and stopped, for even while she spoke, a voice came out of the empty air above our heads; a voice like nothing that I had heard before, a woman's voice thin and tremulous, with a fragile resonance in it, as though it spoke into a bell.