“Well, sir, they Bays as how young Mr Dorrien, he as we was talking about yesterday, he can’t be found nowhere,” said the man, hastening to discharge this last prime event with which his mind was burdened. “He went over to Cranston church by himself last night, and didn’t come home all night.”
“H’m! I don’t see anything very extraordinary in that. He may have had reasons of his own for being out all night, perhaps went somewhere by train, eh, don’t you see?—young men, you know, will be young men—and missed his train back.”
“No, sir, depend upon it there’s something wrong,” dissented the other, provoked at the stranger’s imperturbability. He had taken a great liking to him, “a pleasant-spoken, haffable gent as ever was, and yet a gent every hinch of him, as anybody might see” had been his verdict, in camera, with his colleagues below stairs. “Mistress Dorrien they say is that scared, and she’s going to have the country searched for him. He’s come to grief, ’e has. He carrier from Wandsbro’, he as brought the news—he says”—and here the man’s voice fell to what he intended to be a most impressive and mysterious whisper—“he says that one of them down at Minchkil Bay was coming home along the beach by moonlight and saw the Dorriens’ wraith on ‘The Skegs.’ The ghost always appears before the death of a Dorrien.”
The stranger looked quickly round as a violent shiver ran through him from head to foot.
“Just shut that door, will you? When the front door is open as well, the most infernal draught finds its way in here. It’s enough to give a man his death. Thanks. What were you saying? Something about a ghost?”
Only too delighted with the opportunity, our voluble friend proceeded redundantly to regale the stranger’s ears with the dour legend we heard narrated by very different lips nearly at the commencement of this narrative. But the listener proved sadly sceptical.
“Pooh!” he said, when the other had done. “That won’t wash at all, you know. It’s surprising how these humbugging old myths survive in the country, and the further away from Town you get, the more you find of them.”
“Beg pardon, sir, but shall you be leaving to-day?” asked the waiter, as the stranger rose from the table.
“No.”
“All right, sir. Glad to ’ear it, sir. Custom’s slack just now, sir.”