When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

Immediately Granny Marrable's heart and Widow Thrale's overflowed. What did the doubts that hung over this old person matter, whatever she was, if she was running down visibly within the zone of influence of perceptible mutton-broth; which was confirming, through the door, what the wood-smoke from the chimney had to say about it to the Universe? Let Ruth bring out a cup of it at once for Mrs. Picture. It was quite good and strong by now. Granny Marrable could answer for that.

But it was one thing to be generous to a rival, another to accept a benevolence from one. Mrs. Picture quite roused herself to acknowledge the generosity, but she wouldn't have the broth on any terms, evidently. Gwen thought she could read the history of this between the lines. As we have seen, she was aware of the sort of jealousy subsisting between these two old Grannies about their adopted grandson. She thought it best to favour immediate departure, and Blencorn jumped at the first symptom of a word to that effect. The carriage rolled away, waving farewells to the cottage, and the tenants of the latter went slowly back to the mutton-broth.

And neither of the two old women had the dimmest idea whose face it was that she had looked at in the broad full light of a glorious autumn day; not passingly, as one glances at a stranger on the road, who comes one knows not whence, to vanish away one knows not whither; but inquiringly, as when a first interview shows us the outward seeming of one known by hearsay—one whom our mind has dwelt on curiously, making conjectural images at random, and wondering which was nearest to the truth. And to neither of those who saw this meeting, for all they felt interest to note what each would think of the other, did the thought come of any very strong resemblance between them. They were two old women—that was all!

And yet, in the days of their girlhood, these old women had been so much alike that they were not allowed to dress in the same colour, for mere mercy to the puzzled bystanders. So much alike that when, for a frolic, each put on the other's clothes, and answered to the other's name, the fraud went on for days, undetected!

It seems strange, but gets less strange as all the facts are sorted out, and weighed in the scale. First and foremost the whole position was so impossible per se—one always knows what is and is not possible!—that any true version of the antecedents of the two old women would have seemed mere madness. Had either spectator noted that the bones of the two old faces were the same, she would have condemned her own powers of observation rather than doubt the infallibility of instinctive disbelief, which is the attitude of the vernacular mind not only to what it wishes to be false, but to anything that runs counter to the octave-stretch forlorn—as Elizabeth Browning put it—of its limited experience. Had either noted that the eyes of the two were the same, she would have attached no meaning to the similarity. So many eyes are the same! How many shades of colour does the maker of false eyes stock, all told? Guess them at a thousand, and escape the conclusion that in a world of a thousand million, a million of eyes are alike, if you can. If they had compared the hair still covering the heads of both, they would have found Dave's comparison of it with Pussy's various tints a good and intelligent one. Maisie was silvery white, Phoebe merely grey. But the greatest difference was in the relative uprightness and strength of the old countrywoman, helped—and greatly helped—by the entire difference in dress.

No!—it was not surprising that bystanders should not suspect offhand that something they would have counted impossible was actually there before them in the daylight. Was it not even less so that Maisie and Phoebe, who remembered Phoebe and Maisie last in the glory and beauty of early womanhood, should each be unsuspicious, when suspicion would have gone near to meaning a thought in the mind of each that the other had risen from the grave? It is none the less strange that two souls, nourished unborn by the same mother, should have all but touched, and that neither should have guessed the presence of the other, through the outer shell it dwelt in.

How painfully we souls are dependent on the evidence of our existence—eyes and noses and things!

To get back to the thread of the story. Mrs. Picture, on her part, seemed—so far as her fatigue allowed her to narrate her impressions—to take a more favourable view of her rival than the latter of herself. She went so far as to speak of her as "a nice person." But she was in a position to be liberal; being, as it were, in possession of the bone of contention—unconscious Dave, equally devoted to both his two Grannies! Would she not go back to him, and would not he and Dolly come up and keep her company, and Dolly bring her doll? Would not Sapps Court rise, metaphorically speaking, out of its ashes, and the rebuilt wall of that Troy get bone-dry, and the window be stood open on summer evenings by Mrs. Burr, for to hear Miss Druitt play her scales? It was much easier for Maisie to forgive Phoebe her claim on Dave's affection than vice versa.

She was, however, so thoroughly knocked up by this long drive that she spoke very little to Gwen about Strides Cottage or anything else, at the time. Gwen saw her on the way to resuscitation, and left her rather reluctantly to Mrs. Masham and Lutwyche; who would, she knew, take very good care that her visitor wanted for nothing, however much she suspected that those two first-class servants were secretly in revolt against the duty they were called on to execute. They would not enter their protest against any whim of her young ladyship, however mad they might think it, by any act of neglect that could be made the basis of an indictment against them.

She herself was overdue at the rather late lunch which her august parents were enjoying in solitude. They were leaving for London in the course of an hour or so, having said farewell in the morning to such guests as still remained at the Towers; and intended, after a short stay in town, to part company—the Earl going to Bath, where it was his practice each year to go through a course of bathing, by which means he contended his life might be indefinitely prolonged—to return in time for Christmas, which they would probably celebrate—or, as the Earl said, undergo—at Ancester Towers, according to their usual custom.