When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

"Oh, God have mercy on me! Save me, Phoebe, save me!" she cried. She clung with both hands to her sister, and gasped for breath. Then the paroxysm of her excitement passed, and she sank back, whispering aloud in broken speech:—"I mean ... it came back to me ... the tale ... the letter.... Oh, but it cannot be true!... Tell it me again—tell me what you know."

Phoebe's response flagged. What could her old brain be said to know, yet, in such a whirl? "I'll try, my dear, to say it out right, for you to hear. But 'tis a hard thing to know, and 'tis hard to have to know it. Dr. Nash said it to me, that it was Thornton, your husband. And our young lady of the Towers—she, my dear, you know, that is Lady Gwendolen Rivers—said it to me again." Old Maisie clung closer to the hand she held, and trembled so that Phoebe stopped, saying:—"Ought I to tell?"

"Yes—go on! You know, dear, I know it all—half know it—but I cannot hold it for long—it goes. Go on!"

"He wrote to me—he wrote to you—saying, we were dead. O God, forgive him for his cruelty! Why, oh why?" She fixed her eyes on her sister, and seemed to wait for an answer to the question.

And yet she wondered in her heart when the answer came. It came with a light that broke through the speaker's face, a sound of relief in her words:—"It was his love for me, Phoebe dearest—it was his love for me! He would not have me go from him to my sister in England, even for the time I would have wanted, to see her again. The fault was mine, dear, the fault was mine! I was ever on at him—plaguing—plaguing him to spare me for the time. Oh—'twas I that did it!"

Let her believe it! Let her see a merit in it for the man she loved! That was Phoebe's thought.

"He was always good to me," Maisie continued. "He never thought of what might come of it. All his desire was I should not leave him. Oh, Phoebe, Phoebe, if only I might have died there and then, out in the Colony!"

"To see me no more? Not this once? I thank God that has spared ye to me, Maisie, just but to hear your voice and hold your hand and kiss your face. If I be dreaming, I be dreaming. Only I would not wake, not I. But I can scarce bear myself for the wonderment of it all. How could you come back alone—my Maisie, alone and old!—back again to England—in a ship—through the storms?" For all the mind that Granny Marrable had left after the bewildering shock was aching to know more.

Old Maisie was almost too weak for anything like curiosity about the past; she simply submitted—acquiesced. This was her sister, not dead by some miracle. When in dreams we see again the departed, do we speak of the interim? Surely never? Neither did Maisie. She could not even look forward to knowing more. She could talk on, with no difficulty of speech—indeed, seemed talkative. She could reply now to Phoebe's question:—"But, my dear, I was not alone, nor old. I was not much older than my Ruth that I have found.... Where is she?—she is not gone?" She looked round, frightened, trying to raise herself.

"She is gone away to sleep. It is night, you know. There goes the clock. Four. She will come again.... But, oh, Maisie, was it as long ago as that? 'Tis but a very little while back Ruth turned fifty."