“I say I don’t know—and I clear out. I—I don’t like to speak of him.”
“All right. We shall try to lay that poor ghost,” said Renouard gloomily, going off to a small hut near by to dress. He was saying to himself: “This fellow will end by giving me away. The last thing that I . . . No! That mustn’t be.” And feeling his hand being forced he discovered the whole extent of his cowardice.
CHAPTER X
That morning wandering about his plantation, more like a frightened soul than its creator and master, he dodged the white parasol bobbing up here and there like a buoy adrift on a sea of dark-green plants. The crop promised to be magnificent, and the fashionable philosopher of the age took other than a merely scientific interest in the experiment. His investments were judicious, but he had always some little money lying by, for experiments.
After lunch, being left alone with Renouard, he talked a little of cultivation and such matters. Then suddenly:
“By the way, is it true what my sister tells me, that your plantation boys have been disturbed by a ghost?”
Renouard, who since the ladies had left the table was not keeping such a strict watch on himself, came out of his abstraction with a start and a stiff smile.
“My foreman had some trouble with them during my absence. They funk working in a certain field on the slope of the hill.”
“A ghost here!” exclaimed the amused professor. “Then our whole conception of the psychology of ghosts must be revised. This island has been uninhabited probably since the dawn of ages. How did a ghost come here. By air or water? And why did it leave its native haunts. Was it from misanthropy? Was he expelled from some community of spirits?”
Renouard essayed to respond in the same tone. The words died on his lips. Was it a man or a woman ghost, the professor inquired.