When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

"Well, I was serious underneath. Listen, and I'll tell you. This fiancée of mine that you seem so cocksure about has no existence. I give you my honour that it is so, and that I am glad of it.... Yes—glad of it! How could I bear to think I was inflicting myself on a woman I loved, and making her life a misery to her?"

Gwen thought of beginning:—"If she loved you," and giving a little sketch of a perfect wife under the circumstances. It never saw the light, owing to a recrudescence of Marcus Curtius, who stood to win nothing by his venture—was certainly not in love with Erebus. An act of pure self-sacrifice on principle! Nothing could be farther from her thoughts, be so good as to observe, than that she loved this man!

He went on uninterrupted:—"No, indeed I am heartily glad of it. It would be a terrible embarrassment at the best. I should want to let her off, and she would feel in honour bound to hold on, and really of all the things I can't abide self-sacrifice is.... Well, Lady Gwendolen, only consider the feelings of the chap on the altar! Hasn't he a right to a little unselfishness for his own personal satisfaction?" This was a sad wet blanket for Marcus Curtius.

Gwen did not believe that Adrian's disclaimer of any preoccupation of his affections was genuine. According to her theory of life—and there is much to be said for it—a full-blown Adonis, that is to say, a lovable man, refusing to love any woman on any terms, was a sort of monstrosity. The original Adonis of Art and Song was merely an homme incompris, according to this young lady. He hated Venus—odious woman!—and no wonder. She to claim the rank of a goddess! Besides, Gwen suspected that Adrian was only prevaricating. Trothplight was one thing, official betrothal another. It was almost too poor a shuffle to accuse him of, but she was always flying at the throat of equivocation, even when she knew she might be outclassed by it. "You are playing with words, Mr. Torrens," said she. "You mean that you and this young lady are not 'engaged to be married'? Perhaps not, but that has nothing to do with the matter. I cannot feel it in my bones—as Mrs. Bailey says—that any woman you could care for would back out of it because you ... because of this dreadful accident." Her voice was irresolute in referring to it, and some wandering wave of that electricity that her finger-tips were so full of made a cross-circuit and quickened the beating of her hearer's heart. The vessel it struck in mid-ocean had no time to right itself before another followed. "Surely—if she were worth a straw—if she were worth the name of a woman at all—she would feel it her greatest happiness to make it up to you for such...." She was going to say "a privation," but she always shied off designating the calamity. In her hurry to escape from "privation" she landed her speech in a phrase she had not taken the full measure of—"Well—perhaps I oughtn't to say that! I may be taking the young woman's name in vain. I only mean that that is what I should feel in her position."

It had come as a chance speech before she saw its bearings. There was not the ghost of an arrière pensée behind the simple fact that she had no choice but to judge another woman's mind by her own; a natural thought! Her first instinct was to spoil the force she had not meant it to have, by dragging the red herring of some foolish joke across the trail.

But—to think of it! Here had she been hatching such a brave scheme of making her own life, and all the devotion she somehow believed she could give, a compensation for a great wrong, and here she was now affrighted at the smell of powder! Pride stepped in, and the memory of Quintus Curtius. No—she would not say a single word to undo the effect of her heedlessness. Let the worst stand! They had left her in the place of that hypothesis whom she had herself discarded. It was no fault of hers that had involved her personally. Was she bound to back out? She bit her lip to check her own impulse to utter some cheap corrective.

Until that rather scornful disclaimer of the Duke's son, Mrs. Bailey's piece of fashionable intelligence had served—whether Adrian believed it or not—as a sort of chaperon's ægis extended over this interview. It had protected him against himself—against his impulse to break through a silence that his three weeks' memory of this girl's image had made painful. Recollect that her radiant beauty, in that setting sun-gleam, was the last thing human his eyes had rested on before the night came on him—the night that might be endless. It was not so easy, now that an imaginary fiancée had been curtly swept away, to fight against a temptation he conceived himself bound in honour not to give way to. Not so easy because something, that he hoped was not his vanity, was telling him that this girl beside him, her very self that he had seen once, whose image was to last for ever, was at least not placing obstacles in his way. For anything that she was doing to prevent it, he might drive a coach-and-six through the social code that blocks a declaration of passion to a girl under age without the consent of her parents. He was conscious of this code, and his general acceptance of it. But he was not so law-abiding but that he must needs get on the box—of the coach-and-six—and flick the leaders with his whip.

For he asked abruptly:—"How do you know that?" driving home the nail of personality to the head.

"Perhaps I am wrong," said Gwen, dropping her flag an inch. "But I was thinking so all last night. I was in a sort of fever, you see, because I felt so guilty, and it grew worse and worse...."

"You were thinking that...?"