"Mrs. Ross-Church."
"How long will it take you to do so?"
"Fifteen minutes."
It was in the middle of the night when I must have been fast asleep, and the two young men told me afterwards that they waited the results of their experiment with much trepidation, wondering (I suppose) if I should be conveyed bodily into their presence and box their ears well for their impertinence. Exactly fifteen minutes afterwards, however, the table was violently shaken and the words were spelt out. "I am Mrs. Ross-Church. How dared you send for me?" They were very penitent (or they said they were), but they described my manner as most arbitrary, and said I went on repeating, "Let me go back! Let me go back! There is a great danger hanging over my children! I must go back to my children!" (And here I would remark par parenthèse, and in contradiction of the guardian angel theory, that I have always found that whilst the spirits of the departed come and go as they feel inclined, the spirits of the living invariably beg to be sent back again or permitted to go, as if they were chained by the will of the medium.) On this occasion I was so positive that I made a great impression on my two friends, and the next day Mr. Helmore sent me a cautiously worded letter to find out if all was well with us at Charmouth, but without disclosing the reason for his curiosity.
The facts are, that on the morning of Friday, the day after the séance in London, my seven children and two nurses were all sitting in a small lodging-house room, when my brother-in-law, Dr. Henry Norris, came in from ball practice with the volunteers, and whilst exhibiting his rifle to my son, accidentally discharged it in the midst of them, the ball passing through the wall within two inches of my eldest daughter's head. When I wrote the account of this to Mr. Helmore, he told me of my visit to London and the words I had spelt out on the occasion. But how did I know of the occurrence the night before it took place? And if I—being asleep and unconscious—did not know of it, "Charlie" must have done so.
My ærial visits to my friends, however, whilst my body was in quite another place, have been made still more palpable than this. Once, when living in the Regent's Park, I passed a very terrible and painful night. Grief and fear kept me awake most of the time, and the morning found me exhausted with the emotion I had gone through. About eleven o'clock there walked in, to my surprise, Mrs. Fitzgerald (better known as a medium under her maiden name of Bessie Williams), who lived in the Goldhawk Road, Shepherd's Bush. "I couldn't help coming to you," she commenced, "for I shall not be easy until I know how you are after the terrible scene you have passed through." I stared at her. "Whom have you seen?" I asked. "Who has told you of it?" "Yourself," she replied. "I was waked up this morning between two and three o'clock by the sound of sobbing and crying in the front garden. I got out of bed and opened the window, and then I saw you standing on the grass plat in your night-dress and crying bitterly. I asked you what was the matter, and you told me so and so, and so and so." And here followed a detailed account of all that had happened in my own house on the other side of London, with the very words that had been used, and every action that had happened. I had seen no one and spoken to no one between the occurrence and the time Mrs. Fitzgerald called upon me. If her story was untrue, who had so minutely informed her of a circumstance which it was to the interest of all concerned to keep to themselves?
When I first joined Mr. d'Oyley Carte's "Patience" Company in the provinces, to play the part of "Lady Jane," I understood I was to have four days' rehearsal. However, the lady whom I succeeded, hearing I had arrived, took herself off, and the manager requested I would appear the same night of my arrival. This was rather an ordeal to an artist who had never sung on the operatic stage before, and who was not note perfect. However, as a matter of obligation, I consented to do my best, but I was very nervous. At the end of the second act, during the balloting scene, Lady Jane has to appear suddenly on the stage, with the word "Away!" I forget at this distance of time whether I made a mistake in pitching the note a third higher or lower. I know it was not out of harmony, but it was sufficiently wrong to send the chorus astray, and bring my heart up into my mouth. It never occurred after the first night, but I never stood at the wings again waiting for that particular entrance but I "girded my loins together," as it were, with a kind of dread lest I should repeat the error. After a while I perceived a good deal of whispering about me in the company, and I asked poor Federici (who played the colonel) the reason of it, particularly as he had previously asked me to stand as far from him as I could upon the stage, as I magnetized him so strongly that he couldn't sing if I was near him. "Well! do you know," he said to me in answer, "that a very strange thing occurs occasionally with reference to you, Miss Marryat. While you are standing on the stage sometimes, you appear seated in the stalls. Several people have seen it beside myself. I assure you it is true."
"But when do you see me?" I enquired with amazement.
"It's always at the same time," he answered, "just before you run on at the end of the second act. Of course it's only an appearance, but it's very queer." I told him then of the strange feelings of distrust of myself I experienced each night at that very moment, when my spirit seems to have preceded myself upon the stage.
I had a friend many years ago in India, who (like many other friends) had permitted time and separation to come between us, and alienate us from each other. I had not seen him nor heard from him for eleven years, and to all appearance our friendship was at an end. One evening the medium I have alluded to above, Mrs. Fitzgerald, who was a personal friend of mine, was at my house, and after dinner she put her feet up on the sofa—a very unusual thing for her—and closed her eyes. She and I were quite alone in the drawing-room, and after a little while I whispered softly, "Bessie, are you asleep?" The answer came from her control "Dewdrop," a wonderfully sharp Red Indian girl. "No! she's in a trance. There's somebody coming to speak to you! I don't want him to come. He'll make the medium ill. But it's no use. I see him creeping round the corner now."