When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

The only obstacle to an arrangement for one of the three to be always close at hand when the sleeper waked was the usual one. In such cases everyone wants to be the sentinel on the first watch, and not on any account to sleep. A dictator is needed, and Gwen assumed the office. Her will was not to be disputed. She told Granny Marrable and Ruth to go to bed or at least to go and lie down, and she would call one of them if it was necessary. They looked at each other and obeyed. She herself could lie down and sleep, if she chose, on the big bed beside the old lady, and she might choose. The end would be gained. There would then be no fear of old Maisie awakening alone in the dark, a prey to horrible memories and apprehensions, this last one worst of all—this nightmare son with his hideous gaol-bird past and his veiled threats for the future. That was more important than the meat-jelly, beef-tea, stimulants, what not? They would probably be refused. Still they were to be reckoned with, and Ruth was within call to supply them.

In the darkness and the silence of the night, a solitary, discouraged candle in a shade protesting feebly against the one, and every chance sound that day would have ignored emphasizing the other, the stillness of the figure on the bed became a mystery and an oppression. How Gwen would have welcomed a recurrence of the faintest breath, to keep alive her confidence that this was only sleep—sleep to be welcomed as the surest herald of life and strength! How she longed to touch the blue-veined wrist upon the coverlid, but once, just for a certainty of a beating pulse, however faint! She dared not, even when a heavy avalanche of melted snow from the eaves without, that made her start, left the sleeper undisturbed; even when a sudden faggot in the fireplace, responsive to the snowfall, broke and fell into the smouldering red below, and crackled into flame without awakening her. For Gwen knew the shrewd powers of a finger-touch to rouse the deepest sleeper. But she was grateful for that illumination, for it showed her a silver thread of hair near enough to the nostril to be stirred to and fro by the breath that went and came. And by its light the delicate transparency of the wrist showed the regular pulsation of the heart. All was well.

She had plenty to occupy her thoughts. She could sit and think of the strangeness of her own life, and its extraordinary inequalities. What could clash more discordantly than this moment and a memory of a month ago that rushed into her mind for no apparent reason but to make a parade of its own incongruity. Do you remember that brilliant dress of Madame Pontet that she tried on at Park Lane, with "the usual tight armhole"? That dress had figured as a notable achievement of the modiste's art, worthy of its wearer's surpassing beauty, in a dazzling crowd of Stars and Garters and flashing diamonds, and loveliness that was old enough for Society, and valour that was too old for the field of battle; and much of the wit of the time and a little of the learning, trappings of well-mounted dramatis personæ on the World's stage. That dress and its contents had made many a woman jealous, and been tenacious of many a man's memory, young and old, for weeks after. Here was the wearer, watching in the night beside a convict's relict, a worse convict's mother, a waif and stray picked up in a London Court off Tottenham Court Road! And the heart of the watcher was praying for only one little act of grace in Destiny, to grant a short span yet of life, were it no more than a year, to this frail survivor of a long and cruel separation from one whose youth had been another self to her own.

And as for that other affair, what did she really recollect of it? Well—she could remember that tight armhole, certainly, and was far from sure she should ever forget it.

The chance that had brought the sisters back to each other was so strange that the story of their deception and the loss of every clue to its remedy seemed credible by comparison—a negligible improbability. Would they necessarily have recognised one another at all if that letter had not come into the hands of her father? She herself would never have dared to open it; or, if she had, would she have understood its contents? Without that letter, what would the course of events have been? Go back and think of it! Imagine old Mrs. Picture in charge of Widow Thrale, groundedly suspected of lunacy, miserable under the fear that the suspicion might be true—for who can gauge his own sanity? Imagine Granny Marrable, kept away at Denby by her daughter, that her old age should not be afflicted by a lunatic. Imagine the longing of Sapps Court to have Mrs. Picture back, and the chair with cushions, in the top garret, that yawned for her. Imagine these, and remember that probably old Maisie, to seem sane at any cost, would have gone on indefinitely keeping silence about her own past life, whatever temptation she may have been under to speak again of the mill-model, invisible in its carpet-roll above the fireplace. Remember that what Dr. Nash elicited from her, as an interesting case of dementia, was not necessarily repeated to Mrs. Thrale, and would have been a dead letter in the columns of the Lancet later on. Certainly the chances of an éclaircissement were at a minimum when Gwen returned from London, her own newly acquired knowledge of its materials apart. But then, how about the poor crazy old soul's daughter's new-born love for her unrecognised mother, and her mysteriously heart-whole return for it?

That might have brought the end about. But to Gwen it seemed speculative and uncertain, and to point to no more than a possible return to London of the mother, accompanied by her unknown and unknowing daughter. A curious vision flashed across her mind of Ruth Thrale, entertained at Sapps by old Mrs. Picture; and there, by the window, the table with the new leg; and, in the drawer of it ... what? A letter written five-and-forty years ago, that had changed the lives of both! Gwen's imagination restored the unread letter to its place, with rigid honesty. But—how strange!

Then her imagination came downstairs, and glanced in on the way at the room where the mysterious fireman, who came from the sky, had deposited the half-insensible old lady, after the cataclysm. It was Uncle Mo's room, on the safe side of the house; and the walls were enriched with prints of heroes of the Ring in old time; Figg and Broughton, Belcher and Bendigo, sparring for ever in close-fitting pants by themselves on a very fine day. She recalled how the unmoved fireman, departing, had shown a human interest in one of these, remarking that it was a namesake of his. Suppose that fireman had not been at hand, how would old Maisie have been got downstairs? Suppose that she herself had been flattened under the ruins, would all things now have been quite otherwise? See how much had turned on that visit to Cavendish Square! No—a hundred things had happened, the absence of any one of which might have changed the current of events, and left old Maisie to end her days undeceived; and perhaps the whole tale of her lonely life and poverty to come to light afterwards, and cast a gloom without a chance of solace over the last hours of her surviving twin....

Was that the movement of a long-drawn breath, the precursor of an unspoken farewell to the land of dreams? Scarcely! Nothing but a fancy, this time, bred of watching too closely in the silence! Wait for the clear signs of awakening, sure to come, in time!

It was so still, Gwen could hear the swift tick-tick-tick in the watch-pocket at the bed's head; and, when she listened to it, her consciousness that the big clock in the kitchen was at odds with the hearth-cricket, rebuking his speed solemnly, grew less and less. For the sound we look to hear comes out of the silence, when no other sound has in it the force to speak on its own behalf. Two closed doors made the kitchen-chorus dim. The new faggot had said its say, and given in to mere red heat, with a stray flicker at the end. Drip and trickle were without, and now and then a plash that said:—"Keep in doors, because of me!" Gwen closed her eyes, as, since she was so wakeful, she could do so with perfect safety; and listened to that industrious little watch.

It had become Dolly reciting the days of the week, before she knew her vigilance was in danger. Gwen was certainly not asleep long, because Dolly had only got to the second Tundy, when a scream awoke her, close at hand to where Dolly was seated on General Rawnsley's knee. But it was quick work, to think out where she was, and to throw her arms round the frail, trembling form that was starting up from some terror of dreamland unexplained, on the bed beside her.