Page:The strange experiences of Tina Malone.djvu/76

76 It was the first time she had come like that.

When the automatic writing had come and when I felt her there before she was just "a spirit," but now I seemed to become her, with her personality.

She seemed to take possession of my body. I did not call her and it was not until I found my shoulders bent and began to walk with a slow walk—mother's own—and found my face settling into her placid smile, that I knew what was happening.

Slowly, I found myself walking into my front room and looking round the walls and at the furniture with the interest of one coming back to an old home.

I was dumb with surprise. It was mother herself.

She stayed a little while and then someone knocked at the door and she seemed to go.

But the next morning when I woke, her smile was on my face and my hands, like hers, made little movements as she used when she was ill and could not speak, as she did sometimes when in pain.

She begged me to tell the others she was there. She wanted to know about them all. She had tried to find them and she could not.

I told her of the new homes of those who had moved, and where she could find them.

She shook her head sadly and said she was all alone. She told me she would try to find the others—she wanted so to see them again.

She must have wanted it and I could not help believing she was there.

One day, I went to Bessie's rooms and she was out.

While I was waiting for her to come home again the bent shoulders, bowed head and old familiar smile descended on me and I knew that mother was with me again.

I felt her causing me to get up and then, with the old slow step, she walked along the passage to Bessie's room, looked all round it with the old sweet smile, as if looking with pleasure at the well-remembered things, and when she saw the arm-chair where she had so often sat in those days not so long ago, she wrung her poor old hands and held her lips tight as she did when suffering.

She begged me to tell Bessie and let her speak to her.

When Bessie came home I told her. I called again to mother.

But Bessie would not believe and told me not to talk such nonsense.

Once more she came to me but it was some months later.

I was forced to leave those rooms.

Once more I packed my books and took down my pictures.

As I sat, tired out, the last day, I felt the consciousness