When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

Gwen's laugh rang out soon enough to quash its last ipse dixits. "Then the mischief's done, Lutwyche, and another five minutes doesn't matter. Mrs. Picture's going to tell me all her news. Here—get this thing off! Then you can go till I ring." The thing, or most of it, was an unanswerable challenge to the coldest wind of night—the cast-off raiment of full fifty little sables, that scoured the Russian woods in times gone by. Surely the breezes had drenched it with the very soul of the night air in that ride beneath the stars, and the foam of them was shaken out of it as it released its owner.

Then old Maisie was fully aware of her Guardian Angel, back again—no dream, like those shrimps! And her voice was saying:—"So you had company, Mrs. Picture dear. Lutwyche told me. The widow-woman from Chorlton, wasn't it? How did you find her? Nice?"

Yes, the widow-woman was very nice. She had stayed quite a long time, and had tea. "I liked her very much," said old Maisie. "She was easy." Then—said inference—somebody is difficult. Maisie did not catch this remark, made by one of the most inaudible of speakers. "Yes," she said, "she stayed quite a long time, and had tea. She is a very good young woman"—for, naturally, eighty sees fifty-odd as youth, especially when fifty-odd seems ten years less—"and we could talk about Dave. It was like being home again." She used, without a trace of arrière pensée, a phrase she could not have bettered had she tried to convey to Gwen her distress at hearing she was a plaguy old cat. Then she suddenly saw its possible import, and would have liked to withdraw it. "Only I would not seek to be home again, my dear, when I am near you." She trembled in her eagerness to get this said, and not to say it wrong.

Gwen saw in an instant all she had overlooked, and indeed she had overlooked many things. It was, however, much too late at night to go into the subject. She could only soothe it away now, but with intention to amend matters next day; or, rather, next daylight. So she said:—"The plaster will very soon be dry now in Sapps Court, dear Mrs. Picture, and then you shall go back to Dave and Dolly, and I will come and see you there. You must go to bed now. So must I—I suppose? I will come to you to-morrow morning, and you will tell me a great deal more. Now good-night!" That was what she said aloud. To herself she thought a thought without words, that could only have been rendered, to do it justice:—"The Devil fly away with Mrs. Masham, that she couldn't contrive to make this dear old soul comfortable for a few weeks, just long enough for some plaster to dry." She went near adding:—"And myself, too, not to have foreseen what would happen!" But she bit this into her underlip, and cancelled it.

She rang the bell for Lutwyche, now the sole survivor in the kitchen region. Who appeared, bearing hot water—some for the plaguy old cat. Gwen said good-night again, kissing the old lady affectionately when Lutwyche was not looking. Mistress and maid then, when the cat at her own request was left to get herself into sleeping trim, started on the long journey through corridors and state-rooms through which her young ladyship's own quarters had to be reached. Corridors on whose floors one walked up and down hill; great chambers full of memories, and here and there indulging in a ghost. Tudor rooms with Holbeins between the windows, invisible to man; Jacobean rooms with Van Dycks, nearly as regrettably invisible; Lelys and Knellers, much more regrettably visible. Across the landing the great staircase, where the Reynolds hangs, which your cicerone of this twentieth century will tell you was the famous beauty of her time, and the grandmother of another famous Victorian beauty, dead not a decade since. And on this staircase Gwen, half pausing to glance at her departed prototype, started suddenly, and exclaimed:—"What's that?"

For a bell had broken the silence of the night—a bell that had enjoyed doing so, and was slow to stop. Now a bell after midnight in a house that stands alone in a great Park, two miles from the nearest village, has to be accounted for, somehow. Not by Miss Lutwyche, who merely noted that the household would hear and answer the summons.

Her young ladyship was not so indifferent to human affairs as her attendant. She said:—"I must know what that is. They won't send to tell me. Come back!" She had said it, and started, before that bell gave in and retired from public life.

Past the Knellers and Lelys, among the Van Dycks, a scared figure, bearing a missive. Miss Lupin, and no ghost—as she might have been—in the farther door as her ladyship passes into the room. She has run quickly with it, and is out of breath. "A telegraph for your ladyship!" is all she can manage. She would have said "telegram" a few years later.

A rapid vision, in Gwen's mind, of her father's remains, crushed by a locomotive, itself pulverised by another—for these days were rich in railway accidents—then a hope! It may be the fall of Sebastopol; a military cousin had promised she should know it as soon as the Queen. Give her the paper and end the doubt!... It is neither.

It is serious, for all that. Who brought this?—that's the first question, from Gwen. Lupin gives a hurried account. It is Mr. Sandys, the station-master at Grantley Thorpe, who has galloped over himself to make sure of delivery. Is he gone? No—he has taken his horse round to Archibald at the Stables to refit for a quieter ride back. Very well. Gwen must see him, and Tom Kettering must be stopped going to bed, and must be ready to drive her over to Grantley, if there is still a chance to catch the up-train for Euston. Lutwyche may get things ready at once, on the chance, and not lose a minute. Lupin is off, hotfoot, to the Stables, to catch Mr. Sandys, and bring him round.