When Ghost Meets Ghost. William De Morgan

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СКАЧАТЬ So she testified. Aunt M'riar, speaking from the sink, where she was extracting out the tea-leaves from the pot, was for calling Uncle Moses over the coals. Anybody might soon be afraid to say anything, to have been running away with an idea like that. No one had ever said any such a thing. Indeed, the convict was entirely inferential, and had no foundation except in the fact that the old woman's son had been born at Macquarie Harbour. Uncle Mo's impression that Van Diemen's Land was a sort of plague-spot on the planet—the bacilli of the plague being convicted criminals—was no doubt too well grounded. But it was only a hearsay of youth, and even elderly men may now fail to grasp the way folk spoke and thought of those remote horrors, the Penal Settlements, in the early days of last century—a century with whose years those of Uncle Moses, after babyhood, ran nearly neck and neck. That fellow-creatures, turned t'other way up, were in Hell at the Antipodes, and that it was so far off it didn't matter—that was the way the thing presented itself, and supplied the excuse for forgetting all about it. Uncle Mo had "heard tell" of their existence; but then they belonged to the criminal classes, and he didn't. If people belonged to the criminal classes it was their own look out, and they must take the consequences.

      So that when the old boy referred to this inferential convict as a presumptive fact, the meaning of his own words had little force for himself. Even if the old lady's husband had been a convicted felon, it was now long enough ago to enable him to think of him as he thought of the chain-gangs eight thousand miles off as the crow flies—or would fly if he could go straight; the nearest way round mounts up to twelve. Anyhow, there was no more in the story than would clothe the widowhood of the upstairs tenant with a dramatic interest.

      So, as it appeared that Mrs. Prichard's few words to Aunt M'riar were more illuminating than anything Mrs. Burr had to tell, and they really amounted to very little when all was said and done, there was at least nothing in the convict story to cause misgivings of the fitness of the upstairs attic to supply a haven of security for Dolly, while her aunt went out foraging for provisions; or when, as we have seen sometimes happened, Dolly became troublesome from want of change, and kep' up a continual fidget for this or that, distrackin' your—that is, Aunt M'riar's—attention.

CHAPTER VI

       Table of Contents

      PHOEBE AND THE SQUIRE'S SON. HER RUNAWAY MARRIAGE WITH HIM. HOW HE DABBLED IN FORGERY AND BURNED HIS FINGERS. OF A JUDGE WHO TOOK AFTER THE PSALMIST. VAN DIEMEN'S LAND, AND HOW PHOEBE GOT OUT THERE. HOW BOTH TWINS WERE PROVED DEAD BY IRRESISTIBLE EVIDENCE, EACH TO EACH. HOW THORNTON FORGOT THAT PHOEBE COULD NEVER BE LEGALLY HIS WIDOW. HOW HIS SON ACTED WELL UP TO HIS FATHER'S STANDARD OF IMMORALITY. MARRIAGE A MEANS TO AN END, BUT ONLY ONCE. AN ILL-STARRED BURGLARY. NORFOLK ISLAND. WHY BOTH MRS. DAVERILLS CHANGED THEIR NAMES

      If this story should ever be retold by a skilful teller, his power of consecutive narrative and redisposition of crude facts in a better order will be sure to add an interest it can scarcely command in its present form. But it is best to make no pretence to niceties of construction, when a mere presentation of events is the object in view. The following circumstances in the life of old Mrs. Prichard constitute a case in point. The story might, so to speak, ask its reader's forgiveness for so sudden a break into the narrative. Consider that it has done so, and amend the tale should you ever retell it.

      Maisie Runciman, born in the seventies of the previous century, and close upon eighty years of age at the time of this story, was the daughter of an Essex miller, who became a widower when she and her twin sister Phoebe were still quite children. His only other child, a son many years their senior, died not long after his mother, leaving them to the sole companionship of their father. He seems to have been a quarrelsome man, who had estranged himself from both his wife's relatives and his own. He also had that most unfortunate quality of holding his head high, as it is called; so high, in fact, that his twin girls found it difficult to associate with their village neighbours, and were driven back very much on their own resources for society. Their father's morose isolation was of his own choosing. He was, however, affectionate in a rough way to them, and their small household was peaceful and contented enough. The sisters, wrapped up in one another, as twins so often are, had no experience of any other condition of life, and thought it all right and the thing that should be.

      All went well enough—without discord anyhow, however monotonously—until Maisie and Phoebe began to look a little like women; which happened, to say the truth, at least a year before their father consented to recognise the fact, and permit them to appear in the robes of maturity. About that time the young males of the neighbourhood became aware, each in his private heart, of an adoration cherished for one or other of the beautiful twins from early boyhood. Would-be lovers began to buzz about like flies when fruit ripens. If any one of these youths had any doubt about the intensity and immutability of his passion, it vanished when the girls announced official womanhood by appearing at church in the costume of their seniors. Some students of the mysterious phenomena of Love have held that man is the slave of millinery, and that women are to all intents and purposes their skirts. It is too delicate a question for hurried discussion in a narrative which is neither speculative nor philosophical, but historical. All that concerns its writer is that no sooner did the costume of the miller's daughters suggest that they would be eligible for the altar, than they grew so dear, so dear, that everything masculine and unattached was ambitious to be the jewel that trembled at their ear, or the girdle about their dainty, dainty waist.

      The worst of it for these girls was that their likeness to one another outwent that of ordinary twinship. It resembled that of the stage where the same actor personates both Dromios; and their life was one perpetual Comedy of Errors. Current jest said that they themselves did not know which was which. But they did know, perfectly well, and had no misgivings whatever about becoming permanently confused; even when, having been dressed in different colours to facilitate distinction, they changed dresses and produced a climax of complication. Even this was not so bad as when Phoebe had a tiff with Maisie—a rare thing between twins—and Maisie avenged herself by pretending to be Phoebe, affecting that all the latter's protests of identity were malicious misrepresentation. Who could decide when they themselves were not of a tale? What settled the matter in the end was that Phoebe cried bitterly at being misrepresented, while Maisie was so ill-advised as not to do the same, and even made some parade of triumph. "Yow are Maisie. I heerd yow a-crowun'," said an old stone-dresser, who, with other mill-hands, was referred to for an opinion.

      This was when they were quite young, before slight variations of experience had altered appearance and character to the point of making them distinguishable when seen side by side. Not, however, to the point of rendering impossible a trick each had played more than once on too importunate male acquaintances. What could be more disconcerting to the protestations of a rustic admirer than "Happen you fancy you are speaking to my sister Phoebe, sir?" from Maisie, or vice versa? It was absolutely impossible to nail either of these girls to her own identity, in the face of her denial of it in her sister's absence. Perhaps the only real confidence on the point that ever existed was their mother's, who knew the two babies apart—so she said—because one smelt of roses, the other of marjoram.

      It may easily have been that the power of duping youth and shrewdness, as to which sister she really was, weighed too heavily with each of these girls in their assessment of the value of lovers' vows. And still more easily that—some three years later than the girlish jest related a page since—when Maisie, playing off this trick on a wild young son of the Squire's, was met by an indignant reproach for her attempted deception, she should have been touched by his earnestness and seeming insight into her inner soul, and that the incident should have become the cornerstone of a fatal passion for a damned scoundrel. "Oh, Maisie—Maisie!"—thus ran his protestation—"Dearest, best, sweetest of girls, how can you think to dupe me when your voice goes to my heart as no other voice ever can—ever will? How, when I know you for mine—mine alone—by touch, by sight, by hearing?" The poor child's innocent little fraud had been tried on a past-master in deception, СКАЧАТЬ