When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

This narrative was, of course, quite unintelligible to its hearers; but we understand it, and its mention of the carman's name. A child that has to repeat a story will often confuse incidents limitlessly, and nevertheless hold on with the tenacity of a bull-pup to some saving phrase heard distinctly once and for ever. Even so, Dave held on to Muggeridge, that see to loading up the cart, as a great fact rooted in History.

"H'm!" said Uncle Mo. "I don't make all that out. Who's Muggeridge in it?"

"He sees to the sacks," said Dave.

"Counting of 'em out, I reckon." Uncle Mo was thinking of coal-sacks, and the suggestions of a suspicious Company. Dave said nothing. Probably Uncle Mo knew. But he was all wrong, perhaps because the association of holes with coals misled him.

"Was it Mrs. Marrable and her sister?" asked Aunt M'riar. "Why was they both of a size?"

Dave jumped at the opportunity of showing that he had profited by résumés of this subject with his hostess. "Because they were the soyme oyge," said he. "Loyke me and Dolly. We aren't the soyme oyge, me and Dolly." That is to say, he and Dolly were an example of persons whose relative ages came into court. Their classification differed, but that was a detail.

Aunt M'riar was alive to the possibility that the sister of Granny Marrable was her twin, and said so. But Uncle Mo took her up short for this opinion. "What!" said he, "the same as the old party two pair up? No, no!—you won't convince me there's two old parties at once with twin sisters. One at a time's plenty on the way-bill." Because, you see, Aunt M'riar had had a good many conversations with Mrs. Prichard lately, and had repeated words of hers to Uncle Moses. "I was a twin myself," she had said; and added that she had lost her sister near upon fifty years ago.

The truth was too strange to occur to even the most observant bystander; videlicet, on the whole, Mr. Alibone; who, coming in and talking over the matter anew, only said it struck him as a queer start. This expression has somehow a sort of flavour of its user's intention to conduct inquiry no farther. Anyhow, the subject simply dropped for that time being, out of sight and out of mind.

It was very unfair to Dave, who was, after all, a model of veracity, that he should be treated as a romancer, and never confronted with witnesses to confirm or contradict his statements. Even Uncle Mo, who took him most seriously, continued to doubt the existence of widows' grandmothers, and to accept with too many reservations his account of the mill-model. Sister Nora, as it chanced, did not revisit Sapps Court for a very long time, for she was called away to Scotland by the sudden illness of her father, who showed an equivocal affection for her by refusing to let anyone else nurse him.

So it came about that Dave, rather mortified at having doubt thrown on narratives he knew to be true, discontinued his attempts to establish them. And that the two old sisters, so long parted, still lived on apart; each in the firm belief that the other was dead a lifetime since. How near each had been to the knowledge that the other lived! Surely if Dave had described that mill-model to old Mrs. Picture, suspicions would have been excited. But Dave said little or nothing about it.