Melmoth and Ritchfield

Melmoth and Sir Ritchfield are twins whose connection is presented as more than resemblance: Ritchfield recognizes Melmoth’s eventual return through what he calls a twin feeling, waits for him, and later explains that his silence was meant to help him. Their bond moves through absence, secrecy, and reunion. Its final form is visible in the changed Ritchfield, who stays close to Melmoth, seems happier than before, and no longer appears to want the position of lead ram.

Twinship and the uncanny encounter

The connection first takes striking form in Miss Maple’s encounter with what appears to be two versions of Sir Ritchfield. One stands on George’s Place, accompanied by crows; the other faces him without them. They approach like reflections, lower their horns, and clash them together with a ringing sound. The crowless Ritchfield looks bewildered and recalls the rule that no sheep may leave the flock. He also says that George came back smelling of death and regrets not having kept his mouth shut. The other turns and trots toward the cliffs, while the remaining Ritchfield watches with affection. When the three crows rise, only one Ritchfield is left.

The scene does not explain the doubling in ordinary terms. Instead, its mirrored bodies and shared presence give the twins’ relation an uncanny shape: the flock’s familiar distinction between one sheep and another briefly becomes unstable. Miss Maple is left anxious about the bewildered Ritchfield and runs after him. The encounter therefore presents twinship not simply as likeness, but as a troubling closeness in which the boundary between the two seems to falter. Its crows, the mention of George’s death, and Ritchfield’s distressed regret also connect that intimacy to his burden of withheld knowledge.

Recognition, waiting, and return

Later, when Miss Maple remarks on Melmoth having survived, Ritchfield answers that he expected him to. On the rainy night when Melmoth was away, Ritchfield says, he knew through a twin feeling that Melmoth would return; after that, he waited. The explanation gives emotional meaning to the earlier scenes of absence: Ritchfield’s expectation was not based on evidence he shared with the flock, but on a private certainty rooted in their twinship.

Miss Maple asks why he said nothing. Ritchfield does not answer at first. His silence leaves the practical fact of Melmoth’s return distinct from the reason he kept it to himself, a distinction that becomes central to the later conversation. The episode portrays waiting as an active expression of attachment. Ritchfield does not try to force Melmoth’s return or announce a prediction to the others; he holds to his conviction and remains ready for the twin he believes will come back.

Secrecy and the wish to help

Miss Maple eventually proposes that Ritchfield feared Melmoth might be connected to George’s death. She links the suspicion to Melmoth’s strange behavior and secret nighttime departures after George died, and suggests that Ritchfield concealed his return because he thought Melmoth might have carried anger toward George. This is Maple’s deduction, not an established account of Melmoth’s motive. Ritchfield’s answer is narrower and more intimate: he wanted to help his twin.

Melmoth appears beside them and echoes Ritchfield’s explanation. He dismisses the notion that he was angry with George as baseless talk, then asks whether Ritchfield would come with him into the night he had once been unwilling to enter. He offers to tell the flock the story of the fifth night. The exchange distinguishes the twins’ shared bond from Maple’s theory about its cause: the text confirms Ritchfield’s wish to help, but does not make his suspicion about Melmoth’s feelings true. Melmoth’s response turns the conversation toward a story he is prepared to tell, while leaving the substance of that story to his own account.

Reunion and a changed place in the flock

After Melmoth is back, the flock considers who should be lead ram. The sheep would have liked to keep Sir Ritchfield in the role, but a leader who could not be distinguished at first sight from another ram seemed impractical. The uncertainty of the earlier mirrored encounter thus becomes a concrete difficulty for flock organization: the twins’ likeness makes a single, clearly identifiable leader hard to sustain.

Ritchfield himself has changed. He is more cheerful and playful, almost as daring as a young ram, and spends most of his time close to Melmoth. The flock has never seen him so happy. His reduced interest in leadership accompanies, rather than interrupts, his renewed closeness with his twin. He also makes a new version of the flock’s rule: no sheep may leave unless that sheep comes back again. The rule preserves the force of belonging while allowing for return, and in the context of Melmoth’s absence it resonates as a public expression of the private attachment Ritchfield had already shown by waiting. Their ending is not a restoration of their former arrangement alone; it is a relationship made visible in daily proximity and in a flock rule shaped around the possibility of coming home.