When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

Aunt M'riar, quick on the heels of the convict, who was rather bent on noiselessness than speed, had flung herself upon him—so little had he foreseen such an attack—before he could turn to repel it. She clung to him from behind with all her dead-weight, encumbering that hand with the knife as best she might. She screamed loud with all the voice she had:—"Mo—Mo—he has a knife—he has a knife!" Mo flung away the coat on his arm, and ran shouting. "Leave hold of him, M'riar—keep off him—leave hold!" His big voice echoed down the Court, resonant with sudden terror on her behalf.

But her ears were deaf to any voice but that of her heart, crying almost audibly:—"Save him! Never give that murderous right hand its freedom! In spite of the brutal clutch that is dragging the hair it has captured from the living scalp—in spite of the brutal foot below kicking hard to reach and break a bone—cling hard to it! And if, power failing you against its wicked strength, it should get free, be you the first to meet its weapon, even though the penalty be death." That was her thought, for what had Mo done that he should suffer by this man—this nightmare for whose obsession of her own life she had herself alone to blame?

The struggle was not a long one. Before Mo, whose weak point was his speed, had covered half the intervening distance, a kick of the convict's heavy boot-heel, steel-shod, had found its bone, and broken it, just above the ankle. The shock was irresistible, and the check on the knife-hand perforce flagged for an instant—long enough to leave it free. Another blow followed, a strange one that M'riar could not localise, and then all the Court swam about, and vanished.

What Mo saw by the light of the lamp above as he turned out of Ragstroar's front-gate was M'riar, dressing-gowned and dishevelled, clinging madly to the man he could recognise as her convict husband. He heard her cry about the knife, saw that her hold relaxed, saw the blade flash as it struck back at her. He saw her fall, and believed the blow a mortal one. He heard the voice of Dolly wailing in the house beyond, crying out for the missing bedfellow she would never dream beside again. At least, that was his thought. And there before him was her slayer, with his wife's blood fresh upon his hands.

All the anger man can feel against the crimes of man blazed in his heart, all the resolution he can summon to avenge them knit the muscles of his face and set closer the grip upon his lip. And yet, had he been asked what was his strongest feeling at this moment, he would have answered:—"Fear!"—fear, that is, that his man, more active than himself and younger, should give him the slip, to right or to left, and get away unharmed.

But that was not the convict's thought, with that knife open in his hand. Indeed, the small space at command might have thwarted him. If, for but two seconds, he could employ those powerful fists that were on the watch for him on either side of the formidable bulk whose slow movement was his only hope, then he might pass and be safe. It would have to be quick work, with young Ikey despatched by the screaming women at Ragstroar's to call in help; either his father's from the nearest pot-house, or any police-officer, whichever came first.

Quick work it was! A gasp or two, and the man's natural flinching before the great prizefighter and his terrible reputation had to yield to the counsels of despair. It had to be done, somehow. He led with his left—so an expert tells us we should phrase it—and hoped that his greater alacrity would land a face-blow, and cause an involuntary movement of the fists to lay the body open. Then his knife, and a rip, and the thing would be done.

It might have been so, easily, had it been a turn-to with the gloves, for diversion. Then, twenty years of disuse would have had their say, and the slow paralysing powers of old age asserted themselves, quenching the swift activity of hand and eye, and making their responsive energy, that had given him victory in so many a hard-fought field, a memory of the past. But it was not so now. The tremendous tension of his heartfelt anger, when he found himself face to face with its dastardly object, made him again, for one short moment, the man that he had been in the plenitude of his early glory. Or, short of that, a near approach to it.

For never was a movement swifter than old Mo's duck to the left, which allowed his opponent's "lead off" to pass harmless over his right shoulder. Never was a cross-counter more deadly, more telling, than the blow with his right, which had never moved till that moment, landing full on the convict's jaw, and stretching him, insensible or dead, upon the ground. The sound of it reached the men who came running in through the arch, and made more than one regret he had not been there a moment sooner, to see it.

Speechless and white with excitement, all crowded down to where Mo was kneeling by the woman who lay stretched upon the ground beyond. Not dead, for she was moving, and speaking. And he was answering, but not in his old voice.