When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

He replied:—"I did not go absolutely straight. I went first to where a couple of stones—a respectable married couple, I should say—were standing close together in the fern, with big initials cut on them. Their own, I presume." Gwen said she knew them; they were parish boundaries. "Well—probably that hare was trying what it felt like to be in two parishes at once, for he jumped from behind that stone and started for the Thurrock—that's right, isn't it?"

"Drews Thurrock? Yes."

"It was unfortunately just then that the collar broke. I whistled until I felt undignified, and then went straight for the said Thurrock, rather dreading that I should find Achilles awaiting applause for an achievement in—in leporicide, I suppose...."

"I'm sure you didn't."

"I did not. So I waited a little, and was thinking what I had better do next, when the shot came. You can almost see the place from this window." He got up from his chair, standing exactly where he had stood when his sister made his hand point out Arthur's Bridge in blind show. He made a certain amount of pretence that he could see; and, indeed, seemed to do so. No stranger to the circumstances could have detected it. "I couldn't be sure about the place of the stones, though," said he, carefully avoiding direct verbal falsehood; at least, so Irene thought, trembling at his rashness. He went on:—"Oh dear, how doddery one does feel on one's legs after a turn out of this kind!" and fell back in his chair, his sister alone noticing how he touched it with his hand first to locate it. "I shall be better after a cup of tea," said he. And the whole thing was so natural that although he had not said in so many words that he could see anything, the impression that he could was so strong that Gwen could have laughed aloud for joy. "He really does see something!" she exclaimed to herself.

If he could only have been content with this much of success! But he must needs think he could improve upon it—reinforce it. His remark about the cup of tea had half-reference to its appearance on the horizon; or, rather on the little carved-oak table near the window, whose flaps were being accommodated for its reception as he spoke. The dwellers in this part of the country considered five o'clock tea at this time an invention of their own, and were rather vain of it. Another decade made it a national institution.

"If there is one thing I enjoy more than another," he said, "it is a copper urn that boils furiously by magic of its own accord. When I was a kid our old cook Ursley used to allow me to come into the kitchen and see the red-hot iron taken out of the fire and dropped into the inner soul of ours, which was glorious." This was all perfectly safe, because there was the urn in audible evidence. Indeed, the speaker might have stopped there and scored. Why need he go on? "And these blue Nankin cups are lovely. I never could go crockery-mad as some people do. But good Nankin blue goes to my heart." And he really thought, poor fellow, that he had done well, and been most convincing.

Alas for his flimsy house of cards! Down it came. For there had only been four left of that blue tea-service, and he had broken one. The urn was hissing and making its lid jump in the middle of a Crown Derby tea-set, so polychromatic, so self-assertive in its red and blue and gold, that no ghost of a chance was left of catching at the skirts of colour-blindness to find a golden bridge of escape from the blunder. The most colour-blind eyes in the world never confuse monochrome and polychrome.

There is a sudden terror-struck misgiving on the beautiful face of Gwen, and an uneasy note of doubt in her mother's voice, seeking by vague speech to elude and slur over the difficulty. "The patterns are quite alike," she says weakly. The blind man feels he has made a mistake, and is driven to safe silence. He understands his slip more clearly when the servant, speaking half-aside, but audibly, to the Countess, says:—"Mrs. Masham said the blue was spoiled for four, my lady, and to bring four of the China." Crown Derby is more distinctly China in English vernacular than Nankin blue.

Please understand that the story is giving at great length incidents that passed in fractions of a minute—incidents Time recorded currente calamo for Memory to rearrange at leisure.