Your father took me in to see him, because I was in love with his great-grandmother, once upon a time."
"His _great_-grandmother, General? You must mean his grandmother."
"Not a bit of it, my dear! It's all quite right. I was a boy of eighteen. I'm eighty-four. Sixty-six years ago. If Mary Tracy was alive now, she'd make up to eighty-six. Nothing out of the way in that. She was a girl of twenty then."
"Was it serious, General?"
"God bless me, my dear, serious? I should rather think it was! Why--we ran away together, and went capering over the country looking for a parson to marry us! Serious? Rather! At least, it might have been."
"Oh, General, do tell me what came of it. Did you find the parson?"
"That was just it. We found the Rector of Threckingham--it was in Lincolnshire--and he promised to marry us in a week if he could find someone to give the bride away. He took possession of the young lady.
Then a day or two after down comes Sir Marmaduke and Lady Tracy, black in the face with rage, and we were torn asunder, threatening suicide as soon as there was a chance. I was such a jolly innocent boy that I never suspected the Rector of treachery. Never guessed it at all! He told me thirty years after--a little more. Saw him when the Allied Sovereigns were in London--before Waterloo."
"And that young thing was Adrian's _great_-grandmother!" said Gwen. Then she felt bound in honour to add:--"She was old enough to know better."
"She didn't," said the General. "What's so mighty funny to me now is to think that all that happened about the time of the Revolution in Paris.
Rather before."
Gwen's imagination felt the vertigo of such a rough grapple with the Past. These things make brains reel. "When my old twins were two little girls in lilac frocks," said she.
"Your _what_?" Perhaps it was no wonder--so Gwen said afterwards--that the General was a little taken aback. She would have been so very old to have had twins before the French Revolution. She was able to assign a reasonable meaning to her words, and the old boy became deeply interested in the story of the sisters. So much so that when the ladies rose to go, she said calmly to her mother:--"I'm not coming this time.
You can all go, and I'll come when we have to start the dancing. I want to talk to General Rawnsley." And the Countess had to surrender, with an implication that it was the only course open in dealing with a lunatic.
She could, however, palliate the position by a reference to the abnormal circumstances. "We are quite in a state of chaos to-day," said she to her chief lady-guest. And then to the Earl:--"Don't be more than five minutes.... Well!--no longer than you can help."
The moment the last lady had been carefully shut out by the young gentleman nearest the door, Gwen drove a nail in up to the head, _more suo_. Suppose General Rawnsley had lost a twin brother fifty years ago, and she, Gwen, had come to him and told him it had all been a mistake, and the brother was still living! What would that feel like? What would he have done?
"Asked for it all over again," said the General, after consideration.
"Should have liked being told, you see! Shouldn't have cared so very much about the brother."
"No--do be serious! Try to think what it would have felt like. To oblige me!"
The General tried. But without much success. For he only shook his head over an undisclosed result. He could, however, be serious. "I suppose,"
said he, "the twinnery--twinship--whatever you call it...."
"Isn't _de rigueur_?" Gwen struck in. "Of course it isn't! Any real fraternity would do as well. Now try!"
"That makes a difference. But I'm still in a fix. Your old ladies were grown up when one went off--and then she wrote letters?..."
"Can't you manage a grown-up brother?"
"Nothing over fourteen. Poor Phil was fourteen when he was drowned.
Under the ice on the Serpentine. He had just been licking me for boning a strap of his skate. I was doing the best way I could without it ... to get mine on, you see ... when I heard a stop in the grinding noise--what goes on all day, you know--and a sort of clicky slooshing, and I looked up, and there were a hundred people under the ice, all at once. There was a f'ler who couldn't stop or turn, and I saw him follow the rest of 'em under. Bad sort of job altogether!" The General seemed to be enjoying his port, all the same.
Said Gwen:--"But he used to lick you, so you couldn't love him."
"Couldn't I? I was awfully fond of Phil. So was he of me. I expect Cain was very fond of Abel. They loved each other like brothers. Not like other people!"
"But Phil isn't a fair instance. Can't you do any better than Phil?
Never mind Cain and Abel."
"H'm--no, I can't! Phil's not a bad instance. It's longer ago--but the same thing in principle. If I were to hear that Phil was really resuscitated, and some other boy was buried by mistake for him, I should ... I should...." The General hung fire.
"What should you do? That's what I want to know.... Come now, confess--it's not so easy to say, after all!"
"No--it's not easy. But it would depend on the way how. If it was like the Day of Judgement, and he rose from the grave, as we are taught in the Bible, just the same as he was buried.... Well--you know--it wouldn't be fair play! _I_ should know _him_, though I expect I should think him jolly small."
"But he wouldn't know you?"
"No. He would be saying to himself, who the dooce is this superannuated old cock? And it would be no use my saying I was his little brother, or he was my big one."
"But suppose it wasn't like the Day of Judgement at all, but real, like my old ladies. Suppose he was another superannuated old cock! My old ladies are superannuated old hens, I suppose."
"I suppose so. But I understand from what you tell me that they _have_ come to know one another again. They talk together and recall old times?
Isn't that so?"
"Oh dear yes, and each knows the other quite well by now. Only I believe they are still quite bewildered about what has happened."
"Then I suppose it would be the same with me and my redivivus brother--on the superannuated-old-cock theory, not the Day of Judgement one."
"Yes--but I want you not to draw inferences from _them_, but to say what you would feel ... of yourself ... out of your own head."
The General wanted time to think. The question required thought, and he was taking it seriously. The Earl, seeing him thinking, and Gwen waiting for the outcome, came round from his end of the table, and took the seat the Countess had vacated. He ought to have been there before, but it seemed as though Gwen's _escapade_ had thrown all formalities out of gear. He was just in time for the General's conclusion:--"Give it up!
Heaven only knows what I should do! Or anyone else!"
Gwen restated the problem, for her father's benefit. "I am with you, General," said he. "I cannot speculate on what I should do. I am inclined to think that the twinship has had something to do with the comparative rapidity of the ... recohesion...."
"Very good word, papa! Quite suits the case."
"... recohesion of these two old ladies. When we consider how very early in life they took their meals together...." The General murmured _sotto voce_:--"Before they were born." "... we must admit that their case is absolutely exceptional--absolutely!"
"You mean," said Gwen, "that if they had not been twins they would not have swallowed each other down, as they have done."
"Exactly," said the Earl.
"And yet," Gwen continued, "they never remember things as they happened.
In fact, they are still in a sort of fog about what _has_ happened. But they are quite sure they are Maisie and Phoebe. I do think, though, there is only one thing about Maisie's Australian life that Granny Marrable believes, and that is the devil that got possession of the convict husband.... _Why_ does she? Because devils are in the Bible, of course." Here the devil story was retold for the benefit of the General, who did not know it.
The Earl did, so he did not listen. He employed himself thinking over practicable answers to the question before the house, and was just in time to avert a polemic about the authenticity of the Bible, a subject on which the General held strong views. "What helps me to an idea of a possible attitude of mind before a resurrection of this sort," he said, "is what sometimes happens when you wake up from a dream years long, a dream as long as a lifetime. Just the first moment of all, you can hardly believe yourself free of the horrid entanglement you had got involved in...."
"I know," said Gwen. "The other night I dreamed I was going to be married to a young gentleman I had known from childhood. Only he was a kettle-holder with a parrot on it."
"Didn't I object?" said the Earl.
"You were upstairs. Don't ask explanations. That was all there was in the dream. You were upstairs. And the dream had been all my life. Don't fidget about particulars."
"I won't. That's the sort of dream I mean. It seems all perfectly right and sound until your waking life comes back, and then vanishes. You only regret your friends in the dream for a few seconds, and then--they are nobody!"
"Don't quite see the parallel, yet. These old ladies haven't waked from a dream, that I see." Thus the General, and Gwen told him he was a military martinet, and lacking in insight.