To sue for this act and obtain it was the purpose of that journey upon which Loftus Vaughan was on the eve of setting forth. He had no apprehension of a failure. Had he been only a book-keeper or small tradesman, he might have been less sanguine of success; but, Custos of an important precinct, with scores of friends in the Assembly, he knew that he would only have to ask and it would be given him.
For all that, he was not setting out in very high spirits. The unpleasant prospect of having such a long and arduous journey to make was a source of vexation to him: for the Custos liked an easy life, and hated the fatigue of travel.
But there was something besides that dispirited him. For some days past he had found his health giving way. He had lost appetite, and was rapidly losing flesh. A constant and burning thirst had seized upon him, which, from morning to night, he was continually trying to quench.
The plantation doctor was puzzled with the symptoms, and his prescriptions had failed in giving relief. Indeed, so obstinate and death-like was the disease becoming, that the sufferer would have given up his intention of going to Spanish Town—at least, till a more fitting time—but for a hope that, in the capital, some experienced physician might be found who would comprehend his malady and cure it.
Indulging in this hope, he was determined to set forth at all hazards.
There was still another incubus upon his spirits, and one, perhaps, that weighed upon them more heavily than aught else. Ever since the death of Chakra—or rather, since the glimpse he had got of Chakra’s ghost—a sort of supernatural dread had taken possession of the mind of Loftus Vaughan. Often had he speculated on that fearful phenomenon, and wondered what it could have been. Had he alone witnessed the apparition, he might have got over the awe it had occasioned him: for then could he have attributed it to an illusion of the senses—a mere freak of his imagination, excited, as it was at the time, by the spectacle on the Jumbé Rock. But Trusty had seen the ghost, too! and Trusty’s mind was not one of the imaginative kind. Besides, how could both be deluded by the same fancy, and at the same instant of time?
Turn the thing in his own mind as he might, there was something that still remained inexplicable—something that caused the heart of the Custos to tingle with fear every time that he thought of Chakra and his ghost.
This intermittent awe had oppressed him ever since the day of his visit to the Jumbé Rock—that day described; for he never went a second time. Nor yet did he afterwards care to venture alone upon the wooded mountain. He dreaded a second encounter with that weird apparition.
In time, perhaps, the fear would have died out, and, in fact, was dying out—the intervals during which it was not felt becoming gradually more extended. Loftus Vaughan, though he could never have forgotten the myal-man, nor the terrible incidents of his death, might have ceased to trouble himself with the oughts about Chakra’s ghost, but for a circumstance that was reported to him on the day that Smythje sank into the dead-wood.
On the afternoon of that day, as Quashie was making his way homeward through the forest and over the hills, the darkey declared that, on passing near a noted spot called the Duppy’s Hole, he had “see’d de gose ob ole Chakra!”