When Ghost Meets Ghost. William De Morgan

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СКАЧАТЬ to the one King David took in the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and perceived the advantages he would derive if this forger and gambler was packed off to a life far worse than the death the astute monarch schemed for the great-hearted soldier who was serving him. Whether the two were lawfully man and wife made no difference to this Judge. Maisie's devotion to her scoundrel was the point his lordship's legal acumen was alive to, and he himself was scarcely King of Israel. One wonders sometimes—at least, the present writer has done so—what Bathsheba's feelings were on the occasion referred to. We can only surmise, and can do little more in the case of Maisie. The materials for the retelling of this story are very slight. Their source may be referred to later. For the moment it must be content with the bare facts.

      This Bathsheba was able to say "Hands off!" to her King David, and also able—but Heaven knows how!—to keep up a correspondence with the worthless parallel of the Hittite throughout the period of his detention in an English gaol, or, it may be, on the river hulks, until his deportation in a convict ship to Sydney, from which place occasional letters reached her, which were probably as frequent as his opportunities of sending them, until, a considerable time later—perhaps as much as five years; dates are not easy to fix—one came saying that he expected shortly to be transferred to the new penal settlement in Van Diemen's Land.

      At the beginning of last century the black hulks on the Thames and elsewhere were known and spoken of truly as "floating Hells." Any penal colony was in one point worse; he who went there left Hope behind, so far as his hopes were centred in his native land. For to return was Death.

      After his transfer to Van Diemen's Land, no letter reached her for some months. Then came news that Thornton had benefited by the extraordinary fulness of the powers granted to the Governors of these penal settlements, who practically received the convicts on lease for the term of their service. They were, in fact, slaves. But this told well for Maisie's husband, whose father had been at school with the then supreme authority at Macquarie Harbour. This got him almost on his arrival a ticket-of-leave, by virtue of which he was free within the island during good behaviour. He soon contrived, by his superior education and manners, to get a foothold in a rough community, and saw his way to rising in the world, even to prosperity. In a very short time, said a later letter, he would save enough to pay Maisie's passage out, and then she could join him. The only redeeming trait the story shows of this man is his strange confidence that this girl, whom he had cruelly betrayed, would face all the terrors of a three-months' sea-voyage and travel, alone in a strange land, to become the slave and helpless dependent of a convict on ticket-of-leave.

      She had returned to her father's house a year after the trial, her sister having threatened to leave it unless her father permitted her to do so, taking with her her two children; a very delicate little boy, born in the first year of her marriage, and a girl baby only four months old, which had come into the world eight months after its wretched parent's conviction. During this life at her father's the little boy died. He had been christened, after his father and uncle, Phoebe's rejected suitor—Ralph Thornton Daverill. The little girl she had baptized by the name of Ruth. This little Ruth she took with her, when, on Phoebe's marriage two years later, she went to live at the house of the new-married couple; and one would have said that the twins lived in even closer union than before, and that nothing could part them again.

      It would have been a mistake. Within three years Maisie received a letter enclosing a draft on a London bank for more than her passage-money, naming an agent who would arrange for her in everything, and ending with a postscript:—"Come out at once." Shortly after, no change having been noticeable in her deportment, except, perhaps, an increased tenderness to her child and her sister, she vanished suddenly; leaving only a letter to Phoebe, full of contrition for her behaviour, but saying that her first duty was towards her husband. She had not dared to take with her her child, and it had been a bitter grief to her to forsake it, but she knew well that it would have been as great a bitterness to Phoebe to lose it, as she was herself childless at the time; and, indeed, her only consolation was that Phoebe would still continue to be, as it were, a second mother to "their child," which was the light in which each had always looked upon it.

      Both of them seemed to have been under an impression that only one of two twins can ever become a mother. Whether there is any foundation for this, or whether it is a version of a not uncommon belief that twins are always childless, the story need not stop to inquire. It was falsified in this case by the birth of a son to Phoebe, en secondes noces, many years later. But this hardly touches the story, as this son died in his childhood. All that is needed to be known at present is that, as the result of Maisie's sudden disappearance, Phoebe was left in sole possession of her four-year-old daughter, to whose young mind it was a matter of indifference which of two almost indistinguishable identities she called by the name of mother. With a little encouragement she accepted the plenary title for the then childless woman to whom the name gave pleasure, and gradually forgot the mother who had deserted her; who, in the course of very little time, became the shadow of a name. All she knew then was that this mother had gone away in a ship; and, indeed, for months after little more was known to her aunt.

      However, a brief letter did come from the ship, just starting for Sydney, and the next long-delayed one announced her arrival there, and how she had been met at the port by an agent who would make all arrangements for her further voyage. How this agency managed to get her through to Hobart Town in those days is a mystery, for there was no free immigration to the island till many years after, only transports from New South Wales being permitted to enter the port. She got there certainly, and was met by her husband at the ship. And well for her that it was so, for in those days no woman was safe by herself for an hour in that country.

      It may seem wonderful that so vile a man should have set himself to consult the happiness of a woman towards whom he was under no obligation. But her letters to her sister showed that he did so; and those who have any experience of womanless lands men have to dwell in, whether or no, know that in such lands the market-value of a good sample is so far above rubies, that he who has one, and could not afford another if he lost the first, will be quite kind and nice and considerate to his treasure, in case King Solomon should come round, with all the crown-jewels to back him and his mother's valuation to encourage a high bid. Phoebe had for four or five years the satisfaction of receiving letters assuring her of her sister's happiness and of the extraordinary good fortune that had come to the reformed gambler and forger, whose prison-life had given him a distaste for crimes actively condemned by Society.

      Among the items of news that these letters contained were the births of two boys. The elder was called Isaac after his grandfather at the urgent request of Maisie; but on condition that if another boy came he should be called Ralph Thornton, a repetition of the name of her first baby, which died in England. This is done commonly enough with a single name, but the duplication is exceptional. Whether the name was actually used for the younger child Phoebe never knew. Probably a letter was lost containing the information.

      When Isaac Runciman died Phoebe wrote the news of his death to Maisie and received no reply from her. In its stead—that is to say, at about the time it would have been due—came a letter from Thornton Daverill announcing her sister's death in Australia. It was a brief, unsatisfying letter. Still, she hoped to receive more details, especially as she had followed her first letter, telling of her father's death, with another a fortnight later, giving fuller particulars of the occurrence. In due course came a second letter from her brother-in-law, professing contrition for the abruptness of his first, but excusing it on the ground that he was prostrated with grief at the time, and quite unable to write. He added very full and even dramatic particulars of her sister's death, giving her last message to her English relatives, and so forth.

      But that sister was not dead. And herein follow the facts that have come to light of the means her husband employed to make her seem so, and of his motives for employing them.

      To see these clearly you must keep in mind that Thornton was tied for life within the limits of the penal settlements. Maisie was free to go; with her it was merely СКАЧАТЬ