When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

"You were calling something to mind, all next day, you said. What was that?"

"A man my husband would talk about, in Macquarie Gaol, whose head would be all right so long as no cat came anigh him. So the others would find a cat to start him off. Only my Ruth thought to take away what upset me. 'Tis the same thing, turned about like."

Gwen allowed the illustration. "But why did Mrs. Thrale think you mad, over the mill-model?"

"My dear, because to her I must have seemed mad, to say that was my father's mill, and not her grandfather's."

Gwen kept a lock on her tongue. How easy to have said:—"Your father was her grandfather!" She said nothing.

"And yet, you know, how could I be off the thought it was so, with it there before me, seeming like it did? I do assure you, there it seemed to be—the very mill! There was my father, only small, and not much to know him by, smoking. And there was our man, Muggeridge, that saw to the waggon. And there was Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox, our horses. And there was the great wheel the water shot below, to turn it, and the still water above where Phoebe saw the heron, and called me—but it was gone!" Tears were filling the old eyes, as the old lips recalled that long-forgotten past. Then, as she went on, her voice broke to a sob, and failed of utterance. But it came. "And there—and there—were I and my darling, my Phoebe, that died in the cruel sea! Oh, my dear—that I might have seen her once again! But once again!..." She stopped to recover calm speech; and did it, bravely. "It was all in the seeming of it, my dear, but all the same hard for me to understand. Very like, my dear Ruth here was right and wise to keep it away from me. It might have set me off again. I'm not what I was, and things get on my mind.... There now—my dear. See how I've made you cry!"

Gwen felt that this could not go on much longer without producing some premature outbreak of her overtaxed patience; but she could sit still and say nothing; for a little time yet, certainly. "I'm not crying, dear Mrs. Picture," said she. "It was riding against the cold wind. Go on and tell me more." Then a thought occurred to her—a means to an end. "Tell me about your father. You have never told me about him. When did he die?"

"My father? That I could not tell you, my dear, for certain. For no letter reached me when he died, nor yet any letter since his own, that told me of Phoebe's death. Oh, but it is a place for letters to go astray! Why, before they gave my husband charge over the posts, and made him responsible, the carrier would leave letters for the farm on a tree-stump two miles away, and we were bound to send for them there—no other way! And there was none I knew to write to, for news, when Phoebe was gone, and our little Ruth, and Uncle Nick. Such an odd name he had. I never told it you. Nicholas Cropredy."

"I knew it," said Gwen heedlessly. Then, to recover her foothold:—"Somehow or other! You must have told it me. Else how could I have known?"

"I must have.... No, I never knew when my father died. But I should have known. For I stood by his grave when I came back. Such a many years ago now—even that! But I read it wrong. 'May, 1808....' How did I know it was wrong, what I read? Because I looked at his own letter, telling me of the wreck, and it was that very year—but June, not May. And my son was with me then, and he looked at the letter, too, and said it must have been 1818—eighteen, not eight."