“Park Newton haunted! What ridiculous nonsense is this?” he said at last with a forced laugh. “I lived in the house for years when I was a lad; but I certainly never knew before that it had so peculiar a reputation.”
“It is only of late—only since the murder last May—that people have got into the way of saying these things.”
Again Kester was silent. Richard Dering’s keen glance was fixed on his face. He felt it rather than saw it. His under lip quivered slightly. He moved uneasily in his chair.
“What a parcel of blockheads these people must be!” he exclaimed at last. “Do we live in the nineteenth century, or have we gone back to the middle ages? If I were in your place, sir, I would send the whole lot packing, and have an entirely new set from London. It is only these superstitious country-bred louts who believe in such rubbish as ghosts: your thoroughbred Cockney has no faith in anything half so unsubstantial.”
“It is certainly very singular,” said the General, “that these idle fancies of weak brains should be so contagious. The first man who propagates the idea of a house being haunted has much to answer for. He never finds any lack of ready-made believers; and it is remarkable that we who know better, when we have a subject like this so persistently forced on our notice, come at last, quite unconsciously to ourselves and with no desire whatever to do so, to give a sort of half credence to it. We listen with a more attentive ear to statements so obstinately made, and emanating from so many different sources.”
“My dear uncle,” cried Kester, “you are surely never going to allow yourself to be converted into a believer in this wretched nonsense!”
“My dear Kester, I am not aware that I have ever been accounted as a superstitious man, and I don’t think that I am going to become one so late in the day. I merely say that there is about these matters a certain degree of contagion which it is next to impossible altogether to resist.”
Richard, who up to this point had taken no part in the conversation, now spoke. “From what I can make out,” he said, “there seems to be a strange coherence, a remarkable similarity, in the stories told by the different persons who profess to have seen these appearances. And now they are not content with saying that Park Newton is haunted by one ghost: they will have it that two of them have been seen of late.”
“Two of them!” exclaimed the General and Kester in one breath.
“Ay, two of them,” answered Richard. “One of them I need not name. The other one is said to be the ghost of my poor lost brother.”