When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

"I want to know what happened next." From Gwen.

"Yes—silly old chatterbox!—keep to the point." Thus Irene; and Lady Ancester, who has been accepting the hare and the cats with dignity, even condescension, adds:—"We were just at the most interesting part of the story." This was practically her ladyship's first sight of the son of the man she had gone so near to marrying over five-and-twenty years ago. The search to discover a modus vivendi between a past and present at war may have thrown her a little out of her usual demeanour. Gwen wondered why mamma need be so ceremonious.

Adrian was perfectly unconscious of it, even if Irene was not. He ran on:—"Oh—the story! Yes—Achilles forgot himself, and was off after the hare like a whirlwind.... I don't know, Lady Ancester, whether you have ever blown a whistle in the middle of an otherwise unoccupied landscape, with no visible motive?"

Her ladyship had not apparently. Irene found fault with the narrator's style, suggesting a more prosaic one. But Gwen said: "Oh, Irene dear, what a perfect sister you are! Why can't you let Mr. Torrens tell his tale his own way?"

So Mr. Torrens went on:—"It doesn't matter. If you had ever done so, I believe you would confirm my experience of the position. If Orpheus had whistled, instead of singing to a lute, Eurydice would have stopped with Pluto, and Orpheus would have cut a very poor figure. I began to perceive that Achilles wasn't going to respond, and I knew the hare wouldn't, all along. So I walked on and got to a wood of oaks with an interesting appearance. The interesting appearance was inviting, so I went inside. Achilles was sure to turn up, I thought. Poor dear!—I didn't see him for some days after that, when I came to and heard all about it. He had been very uneasy about me, I'm afraid."

"But inside the wood with the interesting appearance—what happened then?" Gwen would not tolerate digression.

"Well, I came to the edge of a wall with a little sunk glade beyond, and was looking across some blackberry bushes when I heard a rifle-shot, and the whirr of a bullet. I had just time to notice that the whirr came with the gunshot—if it had been in the opposite direction it would have followed it—when I was struck on the head and fell. It was the fall that knocked me insensible, but it was the gunshot that was responsible for all that bleeding.... Do you know, I can't tell you how sorry I am for that old boy that fired the shot? I can't imagine anything more miserable than shooting a man by accident."

It was then that an uneasy feeling about those eyes, that looked so clear and might be so deceiving, took hold of Gwen's mind, and would not be ignored on any terms. The speaker's "you"—was it addressed in this case to her or to her mother? The line of his vision seemed to pass between them. If he could see at all, ever so dimly, he could look towards the person he addressed. One does not always do so; true enough! But one does not stare to right or to left of him. And she felt sure these words had been spoken to herself.

So while her mother was joining in commiseration of old Stephen, towards whom she herself felt rather brutal, she was casting about for some means of coming at the truth. Irene was no good, however altruistic her motives might be for story-telling.... No!—his eyes looked at her in quite another fashion that evening at Arthur's Bridge, in the light of the sunset. She must get at the truth, come what might!

She left her mother to express sympathy for old Stephen, remaining rather obdurately silent; checking a wish to say that it served the old man right for meddling with loaded guns. She waited for the subject to die down, and then recurred to its predecessor. Did Mr. Torrens walk straight from Arthur's Bridge to the Thurrock or go roundabout? She did not really want to know—merely wanted to get him to talk about himself again. He might say something about his sight, by accident.