William De Morgan

“ Oh, Phoebe, Phoebe, if only I might have died there and then, out in the Colony!"
"To see me no more? Not this once? I thank God that has spared ye to me, Maisie, just but to hear your voice and hold your hand and kiss your face. If I be dreaming, I be dreaming. Only I would not wake, not I. But I can scarce bear myself for the wonderment of it all. How could you come back alone—my Maisie, alone and old!—back again to England—in a ship—through the storms?" For all the mind that Granny Marrable had left after the bewildering shock was aching to know more. ”

“ Was it not even less so that Maisie and Phoebe, who remembered Phoebe and Maisie last in the glory and beauty of early womanhood, should each be unsuspicious, when suspicion would have gone near to meaning a thought in the mind of each that the other had risen from the grave? It is none the less strange that two souls, nourished unborn by the same mother, should have all but touched, and that neither should have guessed the presence of the other, through the outer shell it dwelt in. ”

“ Gwen nerved herself for a great effort. She took both the old hands in hers, and all her beauty was in the eyes that looked up at the old face, as she said:—"I will tell you. It is because—I—have to tell her to-day ... that she is ... that she is ... Mrs. Marrable's sister!" The last words might have been a cry for pity.
Could old Maisie fail to catch a gleam of the truth? She did. She only saw that her sweet Guardian Angel was in trouble, and thought to herself:—"Can I not help her?" She immediately said, quite quietly and clearly:—"My dear—my dear! But it will give you such pain. ”

“ And neither of the two old women had the dimmest idea whose face it was that she had looked at in the broad full light of a glorious autumn day; not passingly, as one glances at a stranger on the road, who comes one knows not whence, to vanish away one knows not whither; but inquiringly, as when a first interview shows us the outward seeming of one known by hearsay—one whom our mind has dwelt on curiously, making conjectural images at random, and wondering which was nearest to the truth. ”

“ By now, Gwen always called Widow Thrale "Ruth."
"Who—I? I had quite a long sleep, while mother sat by—by her." This dreadful difficulty of what to call old Maisie! Her daughter was always at odds with it.
Gwen passed on into the bedroom. Just at the door she paused. "You wait outside, and hear," said she. They held back, in the passage, silent.
Old Maisie's voice, on the pillow; audible, not articulate. Two frail hands stretched out in welcome. Two grave eyes, made wild by the surrounding tangle of loose white hair. Those were Gwen's impressions as she approached the bed. ”

“ Neither is ashamed to enforce a contract to demise the self-ownership of one human being to another, when that human being is a woman. And yet Nature is so inexorable that the victim of a cruel marriage often needs help sorely—help against herself, to enable her, on her own behalf, to shake off the Devil some mysterious instinct impels her to cling to. Such an instinct was stirring in Aunt M'riar's chaos of thought and feeling, even through her terror and her consciousness of the vileness of the man and the vileness of his claim over her. ”

“ That is Arthur's Bridge over yonder, where last evening she spoke with this man that now lies dead, and took some note of his great dark eyes in the living glory of the sunset.
As the world and sky swim about her for a moment, even she herself wonders why she should be so hard hit. A perfect stranger! A man she had never before in her life spoken to. And then, for such a moment! But the great dark eyes of the man now dead are upon her, and she does not at first hear that her mother is speaking to her.
"Gwen dear!... Gwen darling!—you hear what Sir Coupland says? We can do no good." ”

“ If Widow Thrale had been seized with a sudden mania for the improbable, and had set her wits to work their hardest on a carefully chosen typical example, could she have lighted on one that would have imposed a greater strain on human powers of belief than the presence, a mile off, of her mother, dead fifty years since? How improbable it would have seemed to her that her aunt and her kith and kin of that date should fall so easily dupes to a fraud! How improbable that folk should be so content without inquiry, on either side of the globe ”

“ The girl's heart stands still as old Stephen stoops down to examine the head, where the blood is that has clotted all the hair and beard and run to a pool in the bracken and leaked away—who can say how plentifully?—into a cleft in the loose stones fallen from the wall. The old keeper is in no trim for his task—one that calls for a cool eye and a steady finger-touch. ”

“ Imagine Granny Marrable, kept away at Denby by her daughter, that her old age should not be afflicted by a lunatic. Imagine the longing of Sapps Court to have Mrs. Picture back, and the chair with cushions, in the top garret, that yawned for her. Imagine these, and remember that probably old Maisie, to seem sane at any cost, would have gone on indefinitely keeping silence about her own past life, whatever temptation she may have been under to speak again of the mill-model, invisible in its carpet-roll above the fireplace. ”

“ During the hour or half-hour that followed, Gwen and Ruth Thrale spoke but once or twice, beneath their breath. Neither could have said why. Who can say why the dwellers in a house where Death is pending speak in undertones? Not from fear of disturbance to the dying man, whose sight and hearing are waning fast. This was a silence of a like sort, though it was rather resurrection than death that imposed it.
The great clock in the kitchen, which had struck twelve when Gwen was showing the forged letter to Widow Thrale, had followed on to one and two, unnoticed. ”

“ For tears and speech come easily to a generous impulsive nature like Gwen's, when strong sympathy and sorrow for others bid them come, though its own affliction might have made it stupefied and dumb.
Her father soothed and calmed her as he would a child; for was she not a child to him—in the nursery only the other day? "I'm not made of wood, darling, am I?" said he. And Gwen replied, refitting spars in calmer water:—"No, dear, that you are not, but Lincoln's Inn Fields is. Sitting there like an Egyptian God, with his hands on his knees!" ”

“ Gwen felt quite despairing. She had actually lost ground. Was it conceivable that the whole tale should become known to Mrs. Prichard—or to both sisters, for that matter—and be discredited on its merits, with applause for its achievements in coincidence? It looked like it! Despair bred an idea in her mind; a mad one, perhaps, a stagey one certainly. How would it be to tell Maisie Phoebe's story, seen from Phoebe's point of view?
Whenever an exciting time comes back to us in after-life, the incident most vividly revived is usually one of its lesser ones. ”

“ Said Granny Marrable:—"I shall follow Maisie soon, if the Lord's will is. She might have died, my lady, but for you, unknown to me in London. And who would have told me where they had laid her?"
"Where are you going?"
"I am going to my granddaughter—Ruth's daughter. It is her fancy to have me rather than another. There might be harm to her did I stop away. Why should I delay here, when all is over?"
Why indeed? Still, Gwen could not but reverence and love the old lady for her unflinching fortitude and resolute sense of duty. ”

“ But all the while old Maisie was haunted with images of a chaise blown into ditches and over bridges, and colliding with blown-down elms, in league for mischief with blown-out lamps. Be advised, and never fidget about the absent!
She would rather have gone on doing so than that the recollection should come back to her of Lutwyche's odious designation that she had taken to herself, so warrantably to all appearance. A plaguy old cat! What had she ever done or said to Miss Lutwyche, or any of them, to deserve such a name? ”

“ Picture her, if you will, at liberty to start from it in terror and scramble up a companion ladder to an open deck, and pick her way through shrouds and a bare headway of restless sprits above, and Heaven knows what of coiled cordage and inexplicable bulkhead underfoot, to some haven where a merciful old mariner, alone upon his watch, shuts his eyes to his duty and tolerates the beautiful girl on deck, when he is told by her that she cannot sleep for the rats. ”

“ As to any misgivings about awakening in another world, if any occurred to Adrian he had but one answer—he had been dead, and had found death unattended with any sort of inconvenience. Resuscitation had certainly been painful, but he did not propose to leave any possibility of it, this time. His death, that time, had been a sudden shock, followed instantly by the voice of Gwen herself, which he had recognised as the last his ears had heard. If Death could be so easily negotiated, why fuss? The only serious objection to suicide was its unpopularity with survivors. ”

“ Gwen perceived her opportunity. "Please do nothing of the sort, Aunt Maria," said she. "Look here! Dolly and I are going up to fetch him. Aren't we, Dolly?"
It would have needed presence of mind to invent obstacles to prevent this, and neither Uncle Mo nor Aunt M'riar showed it, each perhaps expecting Action on the other's part. Moreover, Dolly's approval took such a tempestuous form that opposition seemed useless. Besides, there was that fatal assurance about Gwen that belongs to young ladies who have always had their own way in everything. It cannot be developed in its fulness late in life. ”

“ She slept very sound and—forgot all about her interview with the old visitor at the Towers!
Old Maisie, alone in Francis Quarles as she had been so often in the garret at Sapps Court, became again the mere silver-headed relic of the past, waiting patiently, one would have said, for Death; content to live, content to die; ready to love still; not strong enough to hate, and ill-provided with an object now. Not for the former—no, indeed! Were there not her Dave and her Dolly to go back to? She had not lost them much, for they, too, were away from poor, half-ruined Sapps Court. ”

“ Am I to make believe that I cannot, cannot love a woman unless she produces certificates of affection based solely on the desirability of my inestimable self? I should never make anyone believe that. Why—if I thought Gwen hated me worse than poison, but was marrying me on high moral grounds to square accounts, I don't think I could humbug successfully, to that extent."
"Well, my dear boy, I am bound to confess that I do not see what you can do. I can only repeat to you her ladyship's conviction, and tell you that I believe it to be—what she says it is. ”

“ I am a thing in the dark, with an object, and I call it Gwen. I am an atom adrift in a huge black silence, and it crushes my soul, and I am misery itself. Then I hear the voice that I call Gwen's, and forthwith I am happy beyond the wildest dreams of the Poets—though really that isn't saying much, because their wildest dreams are usually unintelligible, and frequently ungrammatical.... ”

“ Love cools and the dews fall, and the winds sing dirges in the elms through the leaves they will so soon scatter about the world without remorse; and then one morning the grass is crisp with frost beneath the early riser's feet, and he finds the leaves of the ash all fallen since the dawn, a green, still heap below their old boughs stript and cold. ”

“ And into that dream came, suddenly and unprovoked, her sister Phoebe of old, beautiful and fresh as violets in April, and ended a tale of how she would have none of Ralph Daverill, come what might, by saying, "Why, you are all in the dark, and the fire's going out!"
This resurrection of Phoebe, at this moment, may have been mere coincidence—a reflex action of Gwen's sudden reappearance; her first words creating, in her hearer's sleep-waking mind, the readiest image of a youth and beauty to match her own. As soon as the dream died, the dreamer was aware of the speaker's identity. "Oh, my dear!" ”

“ Yes, indeed! To marry Gwen o' the Towers! But how about the poor gentleman's eyesight? This crux was conjointly propounded. "Think what eyesight is to a man!" said Widow Thrale gravely and convincingly.
Mrs. Lamprey echoed back:—"His eyesight?" with a pounce on the first syllable. But seemed to reflect, saying with an abated emphasis:—"Only of course you wouldn't know that." Know what?—said inquiry. "Why—about his eyesight! And perhaps I've no call to tell you, seeing I had it in confidence, as you might say." ”

“ The urn was hissing and making its lid jump in the middle of a Crown Derby tea-set, so polychromatic, so self-assertive in its red and blue and gold, that no ghost of a chance was left of catching at the skirts of colour-blindness to find a golden bridge of escape from the blunder. The most colour-blind eyes in the world never confuse monochrome and polychrome. ”

“ Picture, and some strange navigation on the sea of life were to land one in a long-forgotten port, where the memory still hung on, in a mind or two, of the self one had left behind—would the self one had grown to be bring conviction to the mind or two? ”

“ A night comes always when Oblivion becomes a terror, and we dare not sleep, from fear of what our ears may hear on waking. It had come at Strides Cottage for Granny Marrable and Gwen, and even Ruth was conscious of a creeping dread of Death at hand, waiting on the threshold. ”