The White Soul

The people he had named were a husband and wife, shopkeepers, with a good business. They had taken in a woman, a widow, as they thought, to board with them for life.

The first night after she came the wife suddenly woke up the husband, saying:--

'What is it that kneels at the foot of the bed? surely it is a white soul.'

'I see nothing,' said the husband; 'go to sleep!'

The wife said no more, but the next night it was the same thing, and the next, and the next; and she described so sincerely what she saw, and with so much earnestness, that the husband could have no doubt that what she said was true. And as he saw it disturbed her rest, and made her ill, he said:--

'If it comes again, to-night, we will conjure it.'

It had been going on almost a month (I told you it happened in October), and it was just the night of All Souls' day that he happened to say this.

That night, again, the wife woke him with a start--

'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.'

The lighting up of a masked ball could not be compared to the brightness 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, 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.