When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

Nevertheless, she had no hope of seeing him make his appearance in the brilliantly illuminated Early Jacobean drawing-room, where at least two of the upstairs servants had to light wax tapers for quite ten minutes at dusk, to be even with a weakness of the Earl's for wax-candlelight and no other. And when Irene appeared without him, her "Oh dear!—your brother wasn't up to coming down, then?" was spiritless and perfunctory. Nor did she believe her friend's "No—we thought it best to be on the safe side." For she knew now why it was that this absence from the evening banquet—"family dinner-table" is too modest a phrase—had been so strenuously insisted on. There was no earthly reason why Irene's brother should not have dressed and sat at table. Were there no sofas in the Early Jacobean drawing-room? There was no reason against his presence at all except that his absolute blindness must needs have been manifest to every observer. She could see it all now.

"You know, dear," said Irene, "if Adrian were a reasonable being, there would be no harm in his dining down, as Lutwyche calls it. He could sit up to dinner perfectly, but no earthly persuasion would get him up to bed till midnight. And as for lying down on sofas in the drawing-room after dinner, you could as soon get a mad bull to lie down on a sofa as Adrian, if there was what Lutwyche calls company."

So that evening the beauty of the Earl's daughter—whose name among the countryfolk, by-the-by, was "Gwen o' the Towers"—was less destructive than usual to the one or two new bachelors who helped the variation of the party. For monumental beauty kills only poets and dreamers, and these young gentlemen were Squires. The verdict of one of them about her tells its tale:—"A stunner to look at, but too standoffish for my money!" She was nothing of the sort; and would gladly, to oblige, have shot a smile or an eye-flash at either of them if her heart had not been so heavy. But she wanted terribly to be alone and cry all the evening, and was of no use as a beauty. Perhaps it was as well that it was so, for these unattached males.

When the time came for the loneliness of night she was frightened of it, and let Irene go at her own door with reluctance. In answer to whom she said at parting:—"No—no, dear! I'm perfectly well, and nothing's the matter." Irene spoke back after leaving her:—"You know I'm not the least afraid about him. It will be all right." Then Gwen mustered a poor laugh, and with "Of course it will, dear!" vanished into her bedroom.

She got to sleep and slept awhile; then awoke to the worst solitude a vexed soul knows—those terrible "small hours" of the morning. Then, every mere insect of evil omen that daylight has kept in bounds grows to the size of an elephant, and what was the whirring of his wings becomes discordant thunder. Then palliatives lose their market-value, and every clever self-deception that stands between us and acknowledged ill bursts, bubblewise, and leaves the soul naked and unarmed against despair.

Gwen waked without provocation at about three in the morning; waked Heaven knew why!—for there was all the raw material of a good night's rest; the candidate for the sleepership; a prodigiously comfortable bed; dead silence, not so much as an owl in the still night she looked out into during an excursion warranted to promote sleep—but never sleep itself! She had been dragged reluctantly from a dreamless Nirvana into the presence of a waking nightmare—two great beautiful eyes that looked at her and saw nothing; and this coercion, she somehow felt, was really due to an unaccountable absence of mind on her part. Surely she could have kept asleep with a little more common sense. She would go back from that excursion reinforced, and bid defiance to that nightmare. Sleep would come to her, she knew, if she could find a modus vivendi with a loose flood of golden hair, and could just get hold of a feather-quill that was impatient of imprisonment and wanted to see the world. She searched for it with the tenderest of finger-tips because she knew—as all the feather-bed world knows—that if one is too rough with it, it goes in, and comes out again just when one is dropping off....

There!—it was caught and pulled out. She would not burn it. It would smell horribly and make her think of Lutwyche's remedy for fainting fits, burned feathers held to the nostrils. No!—she would put it through the casement into the night-air, and it would float away and think of its days on the breast of an Imbergoose, and believe them back again. Oh, the difference between the great seas and winds, and the inside of that stuffy ticking! Poor little breast-feather of a foolish bird! Yes—now she could go to sleep! She knew it quite well—she had only to contrive a particular attitude.... There, that was right! Now she had only to put worrying thoughts out of her head and count a thousand ... and then—oblivion!

Alas, no such thing! In five minutes the particular attitude was a thing of the past, and the worrying thoughts were back upon her with a vengeance. Or, rather, the worrying thought; for her plural number was hypocrisy. She was in for a deadly wakeful night, a night of growing fever, with those sightless eyes expelling every other image from her brain. She was left alone with the darkness and a question she dared not try to answer. Suppose that when those eyes looked upon her that evening at Arthur's Bridge for the first time—suppose it was also the last? What then? How could she know it, and know how the thing came about, and whom she held answerable for it, and go on living?...

No—her life would end with that. Nothing would again be as it had been for her. Her childhood had ended when she first saw Death; when her brother's corpse was carried home dripping from within a stone's throw of this new tragedy. But was not that what bills of lading call the "Act of God"—fair play, as it were, on the part of Fate? What was this?... Come—this would never do, with a pulse like that!

No one should ever feel his pulse, or hers, at night. Gwen was none the better for doing it. Nor did she benefit by an operation which her mind called looking matters calmly in the face. It consisted in imaginary forecasts of a status quo that was to come about. She had to skip some years as too horrible even to dream of; years needed to live down the worst raw sense of guilt, and become hardened to inevitable life. Then she filled in her scenario with Sir Adrian Torrens, the blind Squire of Pensham Steynes, and his beautiful and accomplished wife, a dummy with no great vitality, constructed entirely out of a ring on Mr. Torrens's finger and an allusion of Irene's to the Miss Gertrude Abercrombie, whose skill in needlework surpassed Arachne's. Gwen did not supply this lady with a sufficiently well-marked human heart. Perhaps the temptation to make her clever and shrewd but not sympathetic, not quite up to her husband's deserts, was irresistible. It allowed of an unprejudiced consciousness of what she, Gwen, would have been in this dummy's situation. It allowed latitude to a fancy that portrayed Lady Gwendolen Whatever-she-had-become—because, of course, she would have to marry some fool—as the staunch and constant friend of the family at Pensham. Her devotion to the dummy when in trouble—and, indeed, she piled up calamities for the unhappy lady—was monumental; an example to her sex. And when, to the bitter grief of her devoted husband, the dummy died—all parties being then, at a rough estimate, forty—and she herself, his dearest friend, stood by the dummy's grave with him, and, generally speaking, sustained him in his tribulation, a disposition to get the fool out of the way grew strong enough to make its victim doubt her own vouchers for her own absolute disinterestedness. She turned angrily upon her fancies, tore them to tatters, flung them to the winds. One does this, and then the pieces join themselves together and reappear intact.