When Ghost Meets Ghost. William De Morgan
to remember that gunshot, many a wakeful night. For the forecast of a mishap in that fatal pool is soon to be dissipated. As the party draws nearer the dog runs back in his eagerness, then forward again. And then Lady Gwendolen follows him into the wood, and the men follow her in silence. Each has some anticipation in his mind—a thing to be silent about.
There is a dip in the ground ahead, behind which Achilles disappears. Another moment and he is back again, crying wildly with excitement. The girl quickens a pace that has flagged on the rising ground; for they have come quickly. And now she stands on the edge of a buttress-wall that was once the boundary—so says tradition—of an amphitheatre of sacrifice. Twenty yards on yonder is the Druids' altar, or the top of it. For the ground has climbed up stone and wall for fifteen hundred years, and the moss is deep on both; rich with a green no dye can rival, for the soaking of yesterday's rain is on it still. But she can see nothing for the moment, for the dog has leapt the wall and vanished.
"'Tis down below, my lady—beneath the wall." It is the young gardener who speaks. The others have seen what he sees, but are shy of speech. He has more claim than they to the position of a friend, after so many conferences with her ladyship over roots and bulbs this year and last. He repeats his speech lest she should not have understood him.
"Then quick!" says she. And all make for the nearest way down the wall and through the fern and bramble.
What the young gardener spoke of is a man's body, seeming dead. No doubt of his identity, for the dog sits by him motionless, waiting. His part is finished.
Now that the thing is known and may be faced without disguise the men are all activity. Knives are out cutting away rebellious thorny stems that will not keep down for trampling, and a lane is made through the bush that keeps us from the body, while minutes that seem hours elapse. That will do now. Bring him out, gently.
Shot through the head—is that it? Is there to be no hope? 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. For it is he that has done this, and the white face and lifeless eye are saying to him that he has slain a man. He has too much at stake for us to accept his statement that the wound on the temple is no bullet-hole in the skull, but good for profuse loss of blood for all that. He has seen such a wound before, he says. But then his wish for a wound still holding out some hope of life may have fathered this thought, and even a false memory of his experience. Perhaps he is right, though, in one thing. If the body is lifted and carried, even up to the lodge, the blood may break out again. Leave him where he is till the doctor comes.
For, at the first sight of the body, the young groom was off like a shot to harness up the grey in the dog-cart, a combination favouring speed, and drive his hardest to Grantley Thorpe for Dr. Nash, the nearest medical resource. He is gone before the young lady, who knows of one still nearer, can be alive to his action, or to anything but the white face and lifeless hand Achilles licks in vain.
Then, a moment later, she is aware of what has been done, and exclaims:—"Oh dear!—why did you send him? Dr. Merridew is at the Castle." For she knew Sir Coupland before he had his knighthood. Thereon the other groom is starting to summon him, but she stops him. She will go herself; then the great man will be sure to come at once.
Sir Coupland Ellicott Merridew, F.R.S., F.R.C.S., F.R.C.P., etc.—a whole alphabet of them—was enjoying this moment of the first unalloyed holiday he had had for two years, by lying in bed till nine o'clock. If it made him too late for the collective breakfast in the new dining-room—late Jacobean—he had only to ring for a private subsection for himself. He had had a small cup of coffee at eight, and was congratulating himself on it, and was now absolutely in a position not to give any consideration to anything whatever.
But cruel Destiny said No!—he was not to round off his long night's rest with a neat peroration. He was interrupted in the middle of it by what seemed, in his dream-world, just reached, the loud crack of a bone that disintegrated under pressure; but that when he woke was clearly a stone flung at his window. What a capital instance of dream-celerity, thought he! Fancy the first half of that sound having conjured up the operating-theatre at University College Hospital, fifteen years ago, and a room full of intent faces he knew well, and enough of the second half being available for him to identify it as—probably—the poltergeist that infested that part of the house. Perhaps, if he took no notice, the poltergeist would be discouraged and subside. Anyhow, he wouldn't encourage it.
But the sound came again, and the voice surely of Gwendolen, his very great friend, with panic in it, and breathlessness as of a voice-reft runner. He was out of bed in twenty, dressing-gowned in forty, at the window in fifty, seconds. Not a minute lost!
"What's all that? … A man shot! All right, I'll come."
"Oh, do! It's so dreadful. Stephen Solmes shot him by mistake for a dog … at least, I'll tell you directly."
"All right. I'll come now." And in less than half an hour the speaker is kneeling by the body on the grass; and those who found it, with others who have gathered round even in this solitude, are waiting for the first authoritative word of possible hope. Not despair, with a look like that on the face of a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.
"There is a little blood coming still. Wait till I have stopped it and I'll tell you." He stops it somehow with the aid of a miraculous little morocco affair, scarcely bigger than a card-case. He never leaves home without it. Then he looks up at the anxious, beautiful face of the girl who stoops close by, holding a dog back. "He is not dead," says he. "That is all I can say. He must be moved as little as possible, but got to a bed—somewhere. Is that his dog?"
"Yes. This is Achilles."
"How do you know it is Achilles?"
"I'll tell you directly. He told me his name yesterday." She nods towards the motionless figure on the turf. It is not a corpse yet; that is all that can be said, so far.
CHAPTER XI
THE HON. PERCIVAL PELLEW AND MISS CONSTANCE SMITH-DICKENSON, WHOSE BLOOM HAD GONE OFF. OLD MAIDS WERE TWENTY-EIGHT, THENADAYS. HOW THE TRAGEDY CAME OUT, AND MR. PELLEW TALKED IT OVER WITH MISS SMITH-DICKENSON, ALTHOUGH HER BLOOM REMAINED OFF. WHO THE SHOT MAN WAS. OF MR. PELLEW's CAUTION, AND A DARK GREEN FRITILLARY. WHAT YOU CAN DO AND CAN'T DO, WHEN YOU ARE A LADY AND GENTLEMAN
At the Towers, in those days, there was always breakfast, but very few people came down to it. In saying this the story accepts the phraseology of the household, which must have known. Norbury the butler, for instance, who used the expression to the Hon. Percival Pellew, a guest who at half-past nine o'clock that morning expressed surprise at finding himself the only respondent to The Bell. It was the Mr. Pellew mentioned before, a Member of Parliament whose humorous speeches always commanded a hearing, even when he knew nothing about the subject under discussion; which, indeed, was very frequently the case.
Perhaps it was to keep his hand in that he adopted a tone of serious chaff to Mr. Norbury, such as some people think a well-chosen one towards children, to their great embarrassment. He replied to that most responsible of butlers with some pomposity of manner. "The question before the house," said he—and paused to enjoy a perversion of speech—"the question before the house comes down to breakfast I take to be this:—Is it breakfast at all till somebody has eaten it?"
"I could not say, sir." Mr. Norbury's manner is dignified, deferential, and dry. More serious than need be perhaps.
The Hon. Percival is not good at insight, and sees nothing of this. "It certainly appears to me," he says, taking his time over it, "that until breakfast has broken someone's fast, or someone has broken his own at the expense of breakfast. … What's that?"
"One