“Nothing out of the way in haunted houses, I assure you,” I replied, “merely a white lady with a black sack over her head.”

“Oh, that was it,” he answered with a sigh; “I often am afflicted in that way.  Don’t mind me if I turn into a luminous boy, or a very old man in chains, or a lady in a green gown and high-heeled shoes, or a headless horseman, or a Mauth hound, or anything of that sort.  They are all quite imperfect expressions of our nature,—­symptoms, in short, of the malady I mentioned.”

“Then the appalling manifestations to which you allude are not the apparitions of the essential ghost?  It is not in those forms that he appears among his friends?”

“Certainly not,” said the spectre; “and it would be very promotive of good feeling between men and disembodied spirits if this were more generally known.  I myself—­”

Here he was interrupted by an attack of spirit rappings.  A brisk series of sharp faint taps, of a kind I never heard before, resounded from all the furniture of the room. {265} While the disturbance continued, the spectre drummed nervously with his fingers on his knee.  The sounds ended as suddenly as they had begun, and he expressed his regrets.  “It is a thing I am subject to,” he remarked; “nervous, I believe, but, to persons unaccustomed to it, alarming.”

“It is rather alarming,” I admitted.

“A mere fit of sneezing,” he went on; “but you are now able to judge, from the events of to-night, how extremely hard it is for us, with the best intentions, to communicate coherently with the embodied world.  Why, there is the Puddifant ghost—­in Lord Puddifant’s family, you know:  he has been trying for generations to inform his descendants that the drainage of the castle is execrable.  Yet he can never come nearer what he means than taking the form of a shadowy hearse-and-four, and driving round and round Castle Puddifant at midnight.  And old Lady Wadham’s ghost, what a sufferer that woman is!  She merely desires to remark that the family diamonds, lost many years ago, were never really taken abroad by the valet and sold.  He only had time to conceal them in a secret drawer behind the dining-room chimney-piece.  Now she can get no nearer expressing herself than producing a spirited imitation of the music of the bagpipes, which wails up and down the house, and frightens the present Sir Robert Wadham and his people nearly out of their wits.  And that’s the way with almost all of us:  there is literally no connection (as a rule) between our expressions and the things we intend to express.  You know how the Psychical Society make quite a study of rappings, and try to interpret them by the alphabet?  Well, these, as I told you, are merely a nervous symptom; annoying, no doubt, but not dangerous.  The only spectres, almost, that manage to hint what they really mean are Banshees.”

“They intend to herald an approaching death?” I asked.