When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

The man raised his voice, more excitably than angrily. "What did I say just now?—mother!—that's English, ain't it?" But his words had no meaning to her; there was nothing in their structure to change her acceptation of the word "mother," as an apostrophe. Then, in response to the blank unrecognition of her face, he continued:—"What—still? I'm not kidding myself, by God, am I?... No—don't you try it on! I ain't going to have you running away. Not yet a while.... Ah—would you!"

He caught her by the wrist to check her half-shown tendency to turn and run; not, as she thought, from a malefactor, but a madman. A cry for help was stopped by a change in his tone—possibly even by the way his hand caught her wrist; for, though strong, it was not rough or ungentle. Little enough force was needed to detain her, and no more was used. He was mad, clearly, but not ferocious. "I'm not going to hurt ye, mother," said he. "But you leave your eyes on me a minute, and see if I'm a liar." He remained with his own fixed on hers, as one who waits impatiently for what he knows must come.

But no recognition followed. In vain did the old lady attempt—and perfectly honestly—to detect some reminder of some face seen and hitherto forgotten, in the hard cold eyes and thick-set jaw, the mouth-disfiguring twist which flawed features, which, handsome enough in themselves, would have otherwise gone near to compensate a repellent countenance. The effort was the more hopeless from the fact that it was a face that, once seen, might have been hard to forget. After complying to the full with his suggestion of a thorough examination, she was forced to acknowledge failure. "Indeed and indeed, sir," she said, "my memory is all at fault. If ever I saw ye in my life, 'tis so long ago I've forgotten it."

"Ah—you may say long ago!" The madman—for to her he was one; some lunatic at large—seemed to choke a moment over what he had to say, and then it came. "Twenty years and more—ay!—twenty years, and five over—and most of the time in Hell! Ah—run away, if you like—run away from your own son!" He released her arm; but though the terror had come back twofold, she would not run; for the most terrible maniac is pitiful as well as terrible, and her pity for him put her thoughts on calming and conciliating him. He went on, his speech breaking through something that choked it back and made it half a cry in the end. "Fourteen years of quod—fourteen years of prison-food—fourteen years of such a life that * * * prayers, Sundays, and the * * * parson that read 'em was as good as a holiday! Why—I tell you! It was so bad the lifers would try it on again and again, to kill themselves, and were only kept off of doing it by the cat, if they missed their tip." This was all the jargon of delirium to the terror-stricken old woman; it may be clear enough to the ordinary reader, with what followed. "I tell you I saw the man that got away over the cliff, and shattered every bone in his body. I saw him carried out o' hospital and tied up and flogged, for a caution, till the blood run down and the doctor gave the word stop." He went on in a voluble and disjointed way to tell how this man was "still there! There where your son, mother, spent fourteen out of these twenty-five long years past!"

But the more he said, the more clear was it to Granny Marrable that he was an escaped lunatic. There was, however, in all this sheer raving—as she counted it—an entire absence of any note of personal danger to herself. Her horror of him, and the condition of mind that his words made plain, remained; her apprehension of violence, or intimidation to make her surrender valuables, had given place to pity for his miserable condition. His repeated use of the word "mother" had a reassuring effect almost, while she accounted that of the word "son" as sheer distemperature of the brain. But why should she not make use of it to divert his mind from the terrible current of thought, whether delusion or memory, into which he had fallen? "I never had but one son, sir," she said, "and he has been dead twenty-three years this Christmas, and lies buried beside his father in Chorlton church."

The fugitive convict—for the story need not see him any longer from old Phoebe's point of view only—face to face with such a quiet and forcible disclaimer of identity, could not but be staggered, for all that this old woman's face was his mother's; or rather, was the face he had imaged to himself as hers, all due allowance being made—so he thought—for change from sixty-five to eighty. Probably, had he seen the two old sisters side by side, he would have chosen this one as his mother. Her eighty was much nearer to her sixty than old Maisie's. She was no beautiful old shadow, with that strange plenty of perfectly white hair. Time's hand had left hers merely grey, as a set off against the lesser quantity he had spared her. As Dave Wardle had noticed, her teeth had suffered much less than his London Granny's. Altogether, she was marvellously close to what the convict's preconception of "Mrs. Prichard" had been.

It is easy to see how this meeting came about. After he left the hospitable cottage of the Solmes's, he had walked on in a leisurely way, stopping at "The Old Truepenny, J. Hancock," to add another half-pint to the rather short allowance he had consumed at the cottage. This was a long half-pint, and took an hour; so that it was well on towards the early November sunset before he started again for Chorlton. J. Hancock had warned him not to go rowund by t' roo'ad, but to avail himself of the cross-cut over the fields to Dessington. When old Phoebe overtook him, he was beginning to wonder, as he sat on the stile, how he should introduce himself at Strides Cottage. There might be men there. Then, of a sudden, he had seen that the old woman who had disturbed his cogitations, must be his mother! How could there be another old woman so like her, so close at hand?

Her placid, resolute, convincing denial checkmated his powers of thought. As is often the case, details achieved what mere bald asseveration of fact would have failed in. The circumstantial statement that her son lay buried beside his father in Chorlton Churchyard corroborated the denial past reasonable dispute. But nothing could convince his eyesight, while his reason stood aghast at the way it was deceiving him.

"Give me hold of your fin, missus," he said. "I won't call you 'mother.' Left-hand.... No—I'm not going for to hurt you. Don't you be frightened!" He took the hand that, not without renewed trepidation and misgiving, was stretched out to him, and did not do with it what its owner expected. For her mind, following his action, was assigning it to some craze of Cheiromancy—what she would have called Fortune-telling. It was no such thing.

He did not take his eyes from her face, but holding her hand in his, without roughness, felt over the fingers one by one, resting chiefly on the middle finger. He took his time, saying nothing. At last he relinquished the hand abruptly, and spoke. "No—missus—you're about right. You're not my mother." Then he said:—"You'll excuse me—half a minute more! Same hand, please!" Then went again through the same operation of feeling, and dropped it. He seemed bewildered, and saner in bewilderment than in assurance.