When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

"I thought I would make you some toast, more our sort.... Oh yes! What the young lady has brought is very nice, but this will be hotter." The real Pomona never looked about fifty—she was a goddess, you see!—but if she had, and had made toast, she must have resembled Ruth Thrale.

Then old Maisie became more vividly alive to her visitor, helped by the fact that she had been unconscious in her presence. That was human nature. The establishment of a common sympathy about Lupin, the tea-purveyor, was social nature. Pomona had called Miss Lupin "the young lady." This had placed Miss Lupin; she belonged to a superior class, and her ministrations were a condescension. It was strange indeed that such trivialities should have a force to span the huge gulf years had dug between these two, and yet never show a rift in the black cloud of their fraud-begotten ignorance. They did draw them nearer together, beyond a doubt; especially that recognition of Miss Lupin's position. Old Maisie had never felt comfortable with the household, while always oppressed with gratitude for its benevolences. She had felt that she had expressed it very imperfectly to her young ladyship, to cause her to say:—"They will get all you want, I dare say. But how do they behave? That's the point! Are they giving themselves airs, or being pretty to you?" For this downright young beauty never minced matters. But naturally old Maisie had felt that she could do nothing but show gratitude for the attention of the household, especially as she could not for the life of her define the sources of her discomfort in her relations with it.

This saddler's widow from Chorlton, with all her village life upon her, and her utter ignorance of the monstrous world of Maisie's own past experience, came like a breath of fresh air. Was it Pomona though?—or was it the tea? Reserve gave way to an impulse of informal speech:—"My dear, you have had babies of your own?"

Pomona's open-eyed smile seemed to spread to her very finger-tips. "Babies? Me?" she exclaimed. "Yes, indeed! But not so very many, if you count them. Five, all told! Two of my little girls I lost—'tis a many years agone now. My two boys are aboard ship, one in the Black Sea, one in the Baltic. My eldest on the Agamemnon. My second—he's but sixteen—on the Tithonus. But he's seen service—he was at Bomarsund in August. Please God, when the war is over, they'll come back with a many tales for their mother and their granny! I lie awake and pray for them, nights."

The old lady kept her thoughts to herself—even spoke with unwarranted confidence of these boys' return. She shied off the subject, nevertheless. How about the other little girl, the one that still remained undescribed?

"My married daughter? She is my youngest. She's married to John Costrell's son at Denby's farm. Maisie. Her first little boy is just over a year old."

Old Maisie brightened, interested, at the name. A young Maisie, so near at hand! "My own name!" she said. "To think of that!" Yet, after all, the name was a common one.

"Called after her grandmother," said Ruth Thrale, equably—chattily. "Mother has gone over to-day to make up for not going on his birthday." Of course the "grandmother" alluded to was her own proper mother, the young mother on whose head that old silver hair she was watching so unconsciously had been golden brown, fifty years ago. For all that, Ruth spoke of her aunt as "mother," automatically. What wonder that old Maisie accepted Granny Marrable's Christian name as the same as her own. "My name is the same as your mother's, then!" seemed worth saying, on the whole, though it put nothing very uncommon on record.

How near the spark was to the tinder!—how loud that Angel would have had to play! For Ruth Thrale might easily have chanced to say:—"Yes, the same that my mother's was." And that past tense might have spoken a volume.

But Destiny was at fault, and the Angel would have had to play pianissimo. Miss Lupin came in, bearing a log that had taken twenty years to grow and one to dry. The glowing embers were getting spent, and the open hearth called for reimbursement. It seemed a shame those sweet fresh lichens should burn; but then, it would never do to let the fire out! Miss Lupin contrived to indicate condescension in her attitude, while dealing with its reconstruction. No conversation could have survived such an inroad, and by the time Miss Lupin had asked if she should remove the tea etceteras, the review of Pomona's family was forgotten, and Destiny was baffled.