When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

"You must say nothing of him to Ruth. He was her brother."

"Say nothing of him to Ruth—why not?" She had lost sight of her adventure with the convict, and did not identify him. She may have fancied some other son accompanied her sister home.

"Yes—yes—nothing to her! He is not fit to speak of—not fit to think of.... Do not ask about him. Forget him! I do not know if he be alive or dead."

Then an image of the convict, or madman, flashed across Phoebe's mind. She dared not talk of him now, with that wild light and hectic flush in her sister's face; it would only make bad worse. But a recollection of her first association of him with the maniac in the Gadarene tombs was quick on the heels of this image, and prompted her to say:—"Had no evil spirit power over him, then, as well as his father?"

The wild expression on old Maisie's face died down, and gave place to one that was peace itself by comparison. "I see it all now," said she. "Yes—you are right! It was after his father's death he became so wicked." It was the devil that possessed his father, driven out to seek a home, and finding it in the son. That was apparently what her words implied, but there was too much of delirium in her speech and seeming to justify their being taken as expressing a serious thought.

Old Phoebe sat beside her, trying now and again with quiet voice and manner to soothe and hush away the terrible memories of the audacious deception to which each owed a lifelong loss of the other. But when fever seizes on the blood, it will not relax its hold for words.

One effect of this was good, in a sense. It is true, as the poet said, that one fire burns out another's burning—or at any rate that one pain is deadened by another anguish—and it was a Godsend to Granny Marrable and Ruth Thrale that an acupression of immediate anxiety should come to counteract their bewilderment, and to extinguish for the time the conflagration of a thousand questions—whys, whens, and wherefores innumerable—in their overburdened minds. Visible fever in the delicate frame, to which it seemed the slightest shock might mean death, was a summons to them to put aside every possible thought but that of preserving what Time had spared so long, though Chance had been so cruel an oppressor. It would be the cruellest stroke of all that she should be thus strangely restored to them, only to be snatched away in an hour.

Presently she seemed quieter; the fever came in gusts, and rose and fell. She had once or twice seemed almost incoherent, but it passed away. Meanwhile Granny Marrable's memory of that madman or criminal, who had at least known the woman he claimed as his mother well enough to be mystified by her twin sister, rankled in her mind, and made it harder and harder for her to postpone speech about him. She would not tell the incident—she was clear of that—but would it harm Maisie to talk of him? She asked herself the question the next time her sister referred to him, and could not refrain from letting her speech about him finish.

It came of her mind drifting back to that crazy notion of an evil spirit wandering to seek a home; as the hermit-crab, dispossessed of one shell, goes in search of another. After a lull which had looked for a moment like coming sleep, she said with an astonishing calmness:—"But do you not see, Phoebe dear, do you not see how good his father must have been, to do no worse than he did? See what the devil that possessed him could do with Ralph—my youngest, he was; Isaac died—a good boy, quite a good boy, till I lost his father! Oh—see what he came to do!"

"He ... he was sent to prison, was he not?" After saying it, old Phoebe was afraid she might have to tell the whole tale of how she knew it. But she need not have feared. Old Maisie was in a kind of dreamland, only half-cognisant of what was going on about her.