It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

"You must have heard it. When he was a boy—the convict—he was sent with a small package containing a ring to a lady at Tallack's Gate—one of the Cazenoves, I think it was—and on the way he thought it would be good fun to have a look inside his parcel. So he got the ring out, and, standing near this bridge, dropped it. He hunted for it in vain, and then, in terror of his mishap, ran away. I never quite understood it, but I suppose in those days they convicted people very easily...."

"Much more than now! Was this chap convicted?"

"Yes—and sent to Botany Bay. Twenty years after, having served his time, he came back to England, married, and lived to be an old man, but always under a ban. One day he came here, to this spot, with a grown-up daughter to whom he then told the whole tale for the first time. When he finished he said to her: 'I was standing just where you are when I dropped it.' She said, 'Here on the ground, or here on the bridge,' and touched the plank with her parasol. The point of it slipped into a knothole in the wood, and when she drew it out, something glittered on it. It was the ring."

Challis was in the habit of inventing horrors for serials, and had had some success. But it chanced that he had never before heard this story—which, by the way, is told in connection with more than one locality in England—and he envied the master-hand that had fashioned it. He told in exchange the tale of the man who brought what he thought was his wife out of a house on fire, too black for recognition by his scorched and dazzled eyesight, and sat with his hand in hers till a strange voice came from the lips, and asked if the lady had been got out, naming his wife. "But your story is more probable," he in conclusion. "A man would know...."

"Know his own wife's hand? Of course he would! But are we under any obligation to sup full of horrors on a day like this?" Her voice was that of indifference, dismissing an unpleasant topic. Challis slightly resented its placidity, which looked as if the horrors had been easily digested, at least. It seemed to him to do injustice to a sweetness of disposition he chose to consider inseparable from the beautiful eyelids at ease under a slight protest of raised brows—the beautiful lips that waited unclosed for an answer to their question.

"What do you prefer me to talk about?" said he. "The crops? The weather?"

"Nonsense, Scroop!" She paused in her walk, so that he had either to look round at her or show no wish to know why. "I suppose you must have guessed," she said, without logical continuity. A request for explanation would have been warranted.

But Challis was in no mind for make-believe. He took her meaning, which he knew quite well, for granted. "I have had my suspicions," said he. "But I could not catechize, as you seemed so silent. Tell me now!... Which is it?—mother—father?—sister?... Is it Sibyl?—or the Bart?—or the madre?" The way in which these familiar designations were accepted as a matter of course showed how their relations of last September had defined and strengthened themselves.

"All three. At least—I ought to be fair—my father least of all! Indeed, I believe that if an instance could be found of any lady of William the Conqueror's taking part in a Court performance, he would concede the point altogether. Has he spoken to you about it?... Well!—of course he wouldn't do that. But has he 'approached the subject'? Of course, that is what he would do—'approach the subject.'"

"No—no one has said a word about it. But I guessed, soon after I came down, that the play was doomed. I did not at first suppose it was your family, as a matter of course. I thought you might have settled to throw it up on your own account." She made a sort of impatient disclaimer—a head-shake that flung that possibility aside, and forgot it. But she said nothing, and he continued: "There was a row, I suppose? Don't tell me more about it than you like. Don't tell me anything if you...."