When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

The incident of the tea-cups was easily slurred over and forgotten. Adrian Torrens saw the risks of attempting too much, and gave up pretending that he could see. Irene and the Countess let the subject go; the former most willingly, the latter with only slight reluctance. Gwen alone dwelt upon it, or rather it dwelt upon her; her memory could not shake it off. Do what she would the thought came back to her: "He cannot see at all. I must know—I must know!" She could not join in the chit-chat which went on under the benevolent influence of the tea-leaf, the great untier of tongues. She could only sit looking beautiful, gazing at the deceptive eyes she felt so sure were blind to her beauty, devising some means of extracting confession from their owner, and thereby knowing the worst, if it was to come. It was interesting to her, of course, to hear Mr. Torrens talk of the German Universities, with which he seemed very familiar; and of South America, the area of which, he said, had stood in the way of his becoming equally familiar with it. He had been about the world a good deal for a man of five-and-twenty.

"Gwen thought you were more," said Irene. "At Arthur's Bridge, you know! She thought you were twenty-seven."

"Because I was so wet through. Naturally. I was soaked and streaky. Are you sure it wasn't thirty-seven, Lady Gwendolen?"

It has been mentioned that Lady Ancester had a matter-of-fact side to her character. But was it this that made her say thoughtfully:—"Twenty-five perhaps—certainly not more!" Probably her mind had run back nearly thirty years, and she was calculating from the date of this man's father's marriage, which she knew; or from that of his eldest brother's birth, which she also knew. She was not so clear about Irene. At the time of that young lady's first birthday—her only one, in fact—her close observation of her old flame's family dates was flagging. But she was clear that this Adrian's birth had followed near upon that of her own son Frank, drowned a few years since so near the very place of this gunshot accident. The coincidence may have made her identifications keener. Or Adrian's reckless chat, so like his father's in old days that she had more than once gone near to comment on it, may have roused old memories and set her a-fixing dates.

Adrian laughed at the way his age seemed to be treated as an open question. "We have the Registrar on our side, at any rate, Lady Ancester. I can answer for that. By-the-by, wasn't my father ... did not my father?..." He wanted to say: "Was not my father a friend of your brother in old days?" But it sounded as if the friendship, whatever it was, had lessened in newer days, and he knew of nothing to warrant the assumption. He knew nothing of his father's early love passages, of course. Fathers don't tell their sons what narrow escapes they have had of being somebody else, or somebody else being they—an awkward expression!

Her ladyship thought over a phrase or two before she decided on:—"Your father used to come to Clarges Street in my mother's time." She was pleased with the selection; but less so with a second, one of several she tried to herself and rejected. "We have really scarcely met since those days. I thought him wonderfully little changed."

Has a parent of yours, you who read—or of ours, for that matter—ever spoken to one or other of us, I wonder, of some fancy of his or her bygone days; one whose greeting, company manners apart, was an embrace; whose letters were opened greedily; whose smile was rapture, and whose frown a sleepless night? If he or she did so, was the outcome better than the Countess's?

She wanted to run away, but could not just yet. She made believe to talk over antecedents—making a conversation of indescribable baldness, and setting Irene's shrewd wits to work to find out why. It was not her brother, but her husband's, who had been Sir Hamilton's college-friend. Yes, her father was well acquainted with Mr. Canning, and so on. This was her contribution to general chat, until such time had elapsed as would warrant departure and round the visit plausibly off.

It was Clarges Street that had done it. Irene was sure of that! She, the daughter of the Miss Abercrombie her father had married, sitting there and coming to conclusions!

However, the Countess meant to go—no doubt of it. "You have paid my brother such a short visit, after all," said Irene. "Please don't go away because you fancy you are tiring him." But it was no use. Her ladyship meant to go, and went. Regrets of all sorts, of course; explanatory insincerities about stringent obligations elsewhere; even specific allegations of expected guests; false imputation of exacting claims to the Earl. All with one upshot—departure.