When Ghost Meets Ghost. William De Morgan

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СКАЧАТЬ to see her child and her twin-sister again grew and grew, and her appeals to her husband to allow her sometime to revisit England in accordance with his promise became every year more and more urgent. He would be quite a rich man soon—why should she not? Well—simply that she might not come back! That was his view, and we have to bear in mind that it would have been impossible for him to replace her, except from among female convicts assigned to settlers; nominally as servants, but actually as mates on hire—suppose we call them. One need not say much of this unhappy class; it is only mentioned to show that Thornton could have found no woman to take the place of the beautiful and devoted helpmeet whose constancy to him had survived every trial. No wonder he was ill at ease with the idea of her adventuring back to England alone. But it took a mind as wicked as his to conceive and execute the means by which he prevented it. It seems to have been suggested by the fact that the distribution of letters in his district had been assigned to him by the Governor. This made it easy to deliver them or keep them back, when it was in his interest to do so, without fear of detection. The letters coming from England were few indeed, so he was able to examine them at leisure.

      At first he was content to withhold Phoebe's letters, hoping that Maisie would be satisfied with negative evidence of her death, which he himself suggested as the probable cause of their suspension. But when this only increased her anxiety to return to her native land, he cast about for something he could present as direct proof. The death of her father supplied the opportunity. A black-edged sheet came, thickly written with Phoebe's account of his last illness, in ink which, as the event showed, did not defy obliteration. Probably Thornton had learned, among malefactors convicted of his own offence, secrets of forgery that would seem incredible to you or me. He contrived to obliterate this sheet all but the date-stamps outside, and then—the more readily that he had been informed that only fraud for gain made forgery felony—elaborated as a palimpsest a most careful letter in the handwriting of the father announcing Phoebe's own death, and also that of the daughter whom Maisie had bequeathed to her care. He must have been inspired and upborne in this difficult task by the spirit of a true artist. No doubt all faussure, to any person with an accommodating moral sense, is an unmixed delight. This letter remains, and has been seen by the present writer and others. The dexterity of the thing almost passes belief, only a few scarcely perceptible traces of the old writing being visible, the length of the new words being so chosen as to hide most of the old ones. What is even more incredible is that the original letter from Phoebe was deciphered at the British Museum by the courtesy of the gentlemen engaged in the deciphering and explanation of obscure inscriptions.

      The elaborate fiction the forger devised may have been in part due to a true artist's pleasure in the use of a splendid opportunity, such as might never occur again. But on close examination one sees that it was little more than a skilful recognition of the exigencies of the case. The object of the letter was to remove once and for ever all temptation to Maisie to return to her native land. Now, so long as either her sister or her little girl were living in England the old inducement would be always at work. Why not kill them both, while he had the choice? It would be more troublesome to produce proof of the death of either, later. But he mistrusted his skill in dealing with fatal illness. A blunder might destroy everything. Stop!—he knew something better than that. Had not the transport that brought him out passed a drowned body afloat, and wreckage, even in the English Channel? Shipwreck was the thing! He decided on sending Nicholas Cropredy, his wife's brother-in-law, across the Channel on business—to Antwerp, say—and making Phoebe and little Ruth go out to nurse him through a fever. Their ship could go to the bottom, with a stroke of his pen. Only, while he was about it, why not clear away the brother-in-law—send them all out in the same ship? No—that would not do! Where would the motive be, for all those three to leave England? A commercial mission for the man alone would be quite another thing. Very perplexing! … Yes—no—yes! … There—he had got it! Let them go out and nurse him through a fever, and all be drowned together, returning to England.

      That was a triumph. And the finishing touch to the narrative he based on it was really genius. Little hope was entertained of the recovery of the remains, but it was not impossible. The writer's daughter might rest assured that if any came to the surface, and were identified, they should be interred in the family grave where her mother reposed in the Lord, in the sure and certain hope of a joyful resurrection.

      Was it to be wondered at that so skilful a contrivance duped an unsuspicious mind like Maisie's? The only thing that could have excited suspicion was that the letter had been delayed a post—time, you see, was needed for the delicate work of forgery—and the date of despatch from London was in consequence some two months too old. But then the letter was of the same date; indeed, the forgery was a repeat of the letter it effaced, wherever this was possible. Besides, the delay of a letter from England could never occasion surprise.

      She took the sealed paper from her husband, breaking the seals with feverish haste, and destroying the only proof that it had been opened on the way. For the wax, of course, broke, as her husband had foreseen, on its old fractures, where he had parted them carefully and reattached them with some similar wax dissolved in spirit. He watched her reading the letter, not without an artist's pride at her absolute unsuspicion, and then had to undergo a pang of fear lest the news should kill her. For she fell insensible, only to remain for a long time prostrate with grief, after a slow and painful revival.

      There was little need for Thornton to reply to Phoebe's letter that he had effaced. Nevertheless, he did so; partly, perhaps, from the pleasure he naturally took in playing out the false rôle he had assigned himself. Yes—he was a widower. But the poignancy of his grief had prevented him writing all the particulars of his wife's death. He now gave the story of the death of a woman on a farm near, with changed names and some clever addenda, the composition of which amused his leisure and gratified a spirit of falsehood which might, more fortunately employed, have found an outlet in literary fiction. The effect of this letter on Phoebe was to satisfy her so completely of her sister's death that, had it ever been called in question, she would have been the hardest to convert to a belief in the contrary. On the other hand, Maisie's belief in her death was equally assured, and her quasi-husband rested secure in his confidence that nothing would now induce her to leave him. Should he ever wish to be rid of her, he had only to confess his deception, and pack her off to seek her sister. That no news ever came of her father's death was not a matter of great surprise to Maisie. She had no surviving correspondent in England who would have written about it. Her husband may have practised some finesse later to convince her of it, but its details are not known to the writer of the story.

      They, however, were never parted until, twenty years later, his death left Maisie a widow, as she believed. It would have been well for her had it been so, for he died after making that very common testamentary mistake—a too ingenious will. It left to "my third son Ralph Thornton Daverill," on coming of age, all his property after "my wife Maisie, née Runciman," had received the share she was "legally entitled to." But she was unable to produce proof of her marriage when called on to do so, and was, of course, legally entitled to nothing. Thornton had been so well off that "widow's thirds" would have placed her in comfortable circumstances. As it was, the whole of his property went to her only surviving son, a youth who had inherited, with some of his father's good looks, all his bad principles; and in addition a taint—we may suppose—of the penal atmosphere in which he was born. But there was not a shadow of doubt about his being the person named in the will. Perhaps, if it had been worded "my lawful son," Themis would have jibbed.

      The young man, on coming of age, acquired control of the whole of his father's property, and soon started on a career of extravagance and debauchery. His mother, however, retained some influence over him, and persuaded him, a year later, before he had had time to dissipate the whole of his inheritance, to return with her to England, hoping that the moral effect of a change from the gaol-bird atmosphere of felony that hung over the whole land of his birth would develop whatever germ of honour or right feeling he possessed.

      She was not very sanguine, for his boyhood had been a cruel affliction to her. And the results showed that whatever hopes she had entertained СКАЧАТЬ