When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

"I know. Yes, it's him. He's coming this way. If he sees it's us, he'll go off down the side-path. But he won't see—he's too short-sighted. Can't be helped!"

"Oh dear—what a plague people are! Let's be absorbed in the Kinkajou. He'll pass us."

But the great surgeon did nothing of the sort. On the contrary he said:—"I saw it was you, Miss Dickenson." Then he reflected about her companion, and said he was Mr. Pellew, he thought, and further:—"Met you at Ancester in July." It was a great relief that he did not say:—"You are a lady and gentleman, and can perhaps explain yourselves. I can't!" He appeared to decide on silence about them, as irrelevant, and went on to something more to the purpose—"Perhaps you know if the family are in town—any of them?" Miss Dickenson testified to the whereabouts of Lady Gwendolen Rivers, and Sir Coupland wrote it in a notebook. There seemed at this point to be an opportunity to say how delightful the Gardens were this time of the year, so Miss Dickenson seized it.

"I didn't come to enjoy the gardens," said the F.R.C.S. "I wish I had time. I came to see to a broken scapula. Keeper in the Ostrich House—bird pecked him from behind. Did it from love, apparently. Said to be much attached to keeper. Two-hundred-and-two, Cavendish Square, is right, isn't it?"

"Two-hundred-and-two; corner house.... Must you go on? Sorry!—you could have told us such interesting things." The effect of this one word "us," indiscreetly used, was that Sir Coupland, walking away to his carriage outside the turnstiles, wondered whether it would come off, and if it did, would there be a family? Which shows how very careful you have to be, when you are a lady and gentleman.

The former, in this case, remained unconscious of her lapsus linguæ; saying, in fact:—"I think we did that very well! I wonder whether he will go and see Gwen!"

"I hope he will. Do you know, I couldn't help suspecting that he had something to say about Torrens's eyesight—something good. Perhaps it was only the way one has of catching at straws. Still, unless he has, why should he want to see Gwen? He couldn't want to tell her there was no hope—to rub it in!"

"I see what you mean. But I'm afraid he only put down the address for us to tell her he did so—just to get the credit of a call without the trouble."

"When did you take to Cynicism, madam?... No—come, I say—that's not fair! It's only my second cigar since I came to the Gardens...." The byplay needed to make this intelligible may be imagined, without description.

Does not the foregoing lay further stress on the curious fact that the passée young lady and the oscillator between Pall Mall and that Club at St. Stephen's—this describes the earlier seeming of these two—have really vanished from the story? Is it not a profitable commentary on the mistakes people make in the handling of their own lives?