When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

Perhaps it was to keep his hand in that he adopted a tone of serious chaff to Mr. Norbury, such as some people think a well-chosen one towards children, to their great embarrassment. He replied to that most responsible of butlers with some pomposity of manner. "The question before the house," said he—and paused to enjoy a perversion of speech—"the question before the house comes down to breakfast I take to be this:—Is it breakfast at all till somebody has eaten it?"

"I could not say, sir." Mr. Norbury's manner is dignified, deferential, and dry. More serious than need be perhaps.

The Hon. Percival is not good at insight, and sees nothing of this. "It certainly appears to me," he says, taking his time over it, "that until breakfast has broken someone's fast, or someone has broken his own at the expense of breakfast.... What's that?"

"One of the ladies coming down, sir." Mr. Norbury would not, in the ordinary way of business, have mentioned this fact, but it had given him a resource against a pleasantry he found distasteful. Of course, he knew the event of the morning. Yet he could not say to the gentleman:—"A truce to jocularity. A man was shot dead half a mile off last night, and the body has been taken to the Keeper's Lodge."

The lady coming downstairs was Miss Constance Smith-Dickenson, also uninformed about the tragedy. She had made her first appearance yesterday afternoon, and had looked rather well in a pink-figured muslin at dinner. The interchanges between this lady and the Hon. Percival, referring chiefly to the fact that no one else was down, seemed to have no interest for Mr. Norbury; who, however, noted that no new topic had dawned upon the conversation when he returned from a revision of the breakfast-table. The fact was that the Hon. Percival had detected in Miss Dickenson a fossil, and was feeling ashamed of a transient interest in her last night, when she had shown insight, under the guidance—suppose we say—of champagne. Her bloom had gone off, too, in a strange way, and bloom was a sine qua non to this gentleman. She for her part was conscious of a chill having come between them, she having retired to rest the evening before with a refreshing sensation that all was not over—could not be—when so agreeable a man could show her such marked attention. That was all she would endorse of a very temperate Vanity's suggestions, mentally crossing out an s at the end of "attention." If you have studied the niceties of the subject, you will know how much that letter would have meant.

A single lady of a particular type gets used to this sort of thing. But her proper pride has to be kept under steam, like a salvage-tug in harbour when there is a full gale in the Channel. However, she is better off than her great-great-aunts, who were exposed to what was described as satire. Nowadays, presumably, Man is not the treasure he was, for a good many women seem to scrat on cheerfully enough without him. Or is it that in those days he was the only person employed on his own valuation?

In the period of this story—that is to say, when our present veterans were schoolboys—the air was clearing a little. But the smell of the recent Georgian era hung about. There was still a fixed period in women's lives when they suddenly assumed a new identity—became old maids and were expected to dress the part. It was twenty-eight, to the best of our recollection. Therefore Miss Smith-Dickenson, who was thirty-eight if she was a minute, became a convicted impostor in the eyes of the Hon. Percival, when, about ten hours after he had said to himself that she was not a bad figure of a woman and that some of her remarks were racy, he perceived that she was going off; that her complexion didn't bear the daylight; that she wouldn't wash; that she was probably a favourite with her own sex, and, broadly speaking, an Intelligent Person. "Never do at all!" said the Hon. Percival to himself. And Space may have asked "What for?" But nobody answered.

On the other hand, the lady perceived, in time, that the gentleman looked ten years older by daylight; that no one could call him corpulent exactly; that he might be heavy on hand, only perhaps he wanted his breakfast—men did; that the Pall Mall and Piccadilly type of man very soon palled, and that, in short, that steam-tug would be quite unnecessary this time.

Therefore, when Lady Gwendolen appeared, point-device for breakfast as to dress, but looking dazed and preoccupied, she found this lady and gentleman being well-bred, as shown by scanty, feelingless remarks about the absence of morning papers as well as morning people. Her advent opened a new era for them, in which they could cultivate ignorance of one another on the bosom of a newcomer common to both.

"Only you two!" said the newcomer; which Miss Dickenson thought scarcely delicate, considering the respective sexes of the persons addressed. "I knew I was late, but I couldn't help it. Good-morning, Aunt Constance." She gave and got a kiss. The Hon. Percival would have liked the former for himself. Why need he have slightly flouted its receiver by a mental note that he would not have cared about its riposte? It had not been offered.