When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

The terrified woman just found voice for:—"He's not my husband." She could not add a word of explanation.

The convict laughed unwholesomely, beneath his breath. "That's what you've come to, is it? Pretty Polly! Mary the Maid of the Inn! The man you've got is not your husband. Sounds like the parson—Holy Scripture, somewhere! I've seen him. He's at the lush-ken down the road. Now you tell the truth. When's he due back here?"

She had only just breath for the word seven, which was true. It was past the half-hour, and he would not have believed her had she said sooner. But it was as though she told him that she knew she was helplessly in his power for twenty-five minutes. Helplessly, that is, strong resolution and desperation apart!

"Then he won't be here till half-past. Time and to spare! Now you listen to me, and I'll learn you a thing or two you don't know. You are my—lawful—wife, so just you listen to me! Ah, would you?..." This was because he had supposed that a look of hers askant had rested on a knife upon the table within reach. It was a pointed knife, known as "the bread knife," which Dolly was never allowed to touch. He pulled her away from it, caught at it, and flung it away across the room. "It's a narsty, dangerous thing," he said, "safest out of the way!" Then he went on:—"You—are—my—lawful—wife, and what St. Paul says mayhap you know? 'Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.' ... What!—me not know my * * * Testament! Why!—it's the only * * * book you get a word of when you're nursing for Botany Bay fever. God curse 'em all! Why—the place was Hell—Hell on earth!"

Aunt M'riar now saw too late that she should not have opened that door, at any cost. But how about Micky? Surely, however, that was a mere threat. What had this man to gain by carrying it out? Why had she not seen that he would never run needless risk, to gain no end?

The worst thorn in her heart was that, changed as he was from the dissolute, engaging youth that she had dreamed of reforming, she still knew him for himself. He was, as he said, her husband. And, for all that she shrank from him and his criminality with horror, she was obliged to acknowledge—oh, how bitterly!—that she wanted help against herself as much as against him. She was obliged to acknowledge the grisly force of Nature, that dictated the reimposition of the yoke that she had through all these years conceived that she had shaken off. And she knew that she might look in vain for help to Law, human or theological. For each in its own way, and for its own purposes, gives countenance to the only consignment of one human creature to the power of another that the slow evolution of Justice has left in civilised society. Each says to the girl trapped into unholy matrimony, from whom the right to look inside the trap has been cunningly withheld:—"Back to your lord and master! Go to him, he is your husband—kiss him—take his hand in thine!" Neither is ashamed to enforce a contract to demise the self-ownership of one human being to another, when that human being is a woman. And yet Nature is so inexorable that the victim of a cruel marriage often needs help sorely—help against herself, to enable her, on her own behalf, to shake off the Devil some mysterious instinct impels her to cling to. Such an instinct was stirring in Aunt M'riar's chaos of thought and feeling, even through her terror and her consciousness of the vileness of the man and the vileness of his claim over her. The idea of using the power that her knowledge of his position gave her never crossed her mind. Say rather that the fear that a call for help would consign him to a just retribution for his crimes was the chief cause of her silence.

A dread that she might be compelled to do so was lessened by his next speech. "You've no call to look so scared, Polly Daverill. You do what I tell you, and be sharp about it. What are you good for?—that's the question! Got any money in the house?"

She felt relieved. Now he would take his arm away. That arm was all the worse from the fact that her shrinking from it was one-sided. "A little," she answered. "It's upstairs. Let me get it."

He relaxed the arm. "Go ahead!" he said. "I'll follow up."

She cried out with sudden emphasis:—"No—I will not. I will not." And then with subdued earnestness:—"Indeed I will bring it down. Indeed I will."