When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

Gwen saw the embarrassment, and skipped explanation. "Why not call her Mrs. Picture—little Dave's name?" Then she felt this was a mistake, and added:—"No, I suppose that wouldn't do!"

"Something will come, to say, in time. One's head goes, now." Ruth went on to speak of her childish recollection of the news of her mother's death—quite a vivid memory—when she was nearly nine years old. "I was quite a big little maid when the letter came. We got it out, you know, just now. And, oh, how sick it made me!"

"I should like so much to see it," said Gwen. Her young ladyship's lightest wish was law, and Ruth nearly went to seek the letter. Gwen had to be very emphatic that another time would do, to stop her.

"Then I will get it out presently, and give it to your ladyship to take away and read," said Ruth, and went back to what she was saying. "That is how I came to be able to call her my mother, at once. I mean the moment I knew she was not Mrs. Prichard. Now that I know it, I keep looking at her dear old face to make it out the same face that I kept on thinking my mother in Australia had, all the time I thought she was living there away from us. And if I had never known she died—I mean had we never thought her dead—I would have gone on thinking the same face. Oh, such a beautiful young face! Exactly like what mother's was then!—the same face for her that it was when I last saw it...."

"I see. And when you look at your—your aunt's face, you naturally do not look for what she was forty years ago."

"That is it, your ladyship. Because I have had mother to go by, all the time. She has always been the same she was last week—last month—last year—any time. What must it be to her, to see me what I am!"

"I don't believe it is harder for her to think about than it is for you. She is feverish now, and that makes her wander. People are always worse in the morning. Dr. Nash says so. I thought yesterday she seemed so clear—almost understood it all." Thus Gwen, not over-sure of her facts.

"She was worse," said Ruth, thinking back into the recent events, "that evening I showed her the mill. That was her bad time. Who knows but that has made it easier for her now? I shouldn't wonder.... And to think that I thought her mad, and never guessed who I was, myself, all that time."

"Was that the model?" said Gwen, thinking that anything the mind could rest on might make the thing more real for Ruth. "Do you know I have only half seen it? I should so like to see it again. Why have you covered it up?" A few words explained this, and the mill was again put on the table. If the little dolly figures had only possessed faculties, they would have wondered why, after all these years, they were awakening such an interest among the big movable creatures outside the glass. How they would have wondered at Gwen's next words:—"And those two have lived to be eighty years old and are in the next room!"

Then she was not sure she had not made matters worse. "Oh dear!" said Widow Thrale, "it is all impossible—impossible! This was old when I was a child."