"I should like to keelhaul that ghost," cried the discomfited captain. "I'd rather have seen ten mermaids."
Isaac Thornycroft, with an imperative gesture, took Anna on his own arm, leaving the captain to peg on alone, with Sarah still in close proximity to the coattails. He did not say what he had been doing all the evening, or why he should have come up at that particular juncture.
Upon the return of Richard to the Red Court an hour or two earlier, Isaac drew him at once out of the house to impart to him this curious fact of Hunter's ghost--as Coastdown phrased it--making its appearance nightly in the churchyard. Truth to say, the affair was altogether puzzling Isaac, bringing him trouble also. He had seen it himself the previous evening. Who was it? what did it want? whence did it come? That it wore Hunter's face and form was indisputable. What then was it? His ghost?--a kind of marvel which Isaac had never yet believed in,--or a man got up to personate him? Of course what Isaac feared was, that it might lead to discovery of various matters connected with the past.
He imparted all this to Richard. Richard scorned the information at first, ridiculed the affair, would not believe in the fear. Isaac proposed that they should go together to the churchyard, conceal themselves behind a convenient tombstone, watch for the appearance, and pounce upon it. Richard mockingly refused; if he went at all to the place he'd go by himself and deal with the "ghost" at leisure. At present he had business with Tomlett.
They went together to Tomlett's cottage, and sat there talking. The baker's boy came up on an errand; and as Mrs. Tomlett answered the door they heard him tell her that "the ghost was then--then--in the churchyard, his face and his coat awful white."
"The coat has been stolen from the Mermaid," spoke Richard in his decisive tones.
"That fact was easy to be ascertained," Isaac answered. And, rising at once from his seat, he went to the Mermaid there and then. Calling Pettipher, they went up the ladder to the tallet, and Isaac convinced himself that there the coat lay, untouched, and in fact unusable. From thence he went his way to the churchyard, intending to see what he could do with the ghost himself, and thus overtook Captain Copp and his party.
Nothing of this did he say to Anna. Leaving the ghost for the time being, he went on to Captain Copp's. She held his arm, not daring to let it go; her mind in a state of extreme distress. Trembling from head to foot went she; a sob breaking from her now and again.
"What can it be looking for?" burst from her in her grief and perplexity. "For you?"
For the thought, the fear that had been beating its terrible refrain in her brain was, that Robert Hunter's spirit, unable to rest, had come to denounce his destroyer. Such tales had over and over again been told in the world's history: why should not this be but another to add to them?