Several weeks later, it cropped up again. Francis Radcliffe (if the reader has not forgotten him, and who had not long before been delivered out of his brother's hands at Sandstone Torr) was passing along at the back of Caromel's Farm, when he saw a figure that bore an extraordinary resemblance to Nash Caromel. The Squire laughed well when told of it, and Radcliffe laughed too. "But," said he, "had Nash Caromel not been dead, I could have sworn it was he, or his shadow, before any justice of the peace."
His shadow! The same word that Dobbs had used. Francis Radcliffe told this story everywhere, and it caused no little excitement.
"What does this silly rumour mean--about Nash Caromel being seen?" demanded the Squire one day when he met Nave, and condescended to stop to speak to him.
And Nave, hearing the question, turned quite blue: the pater told us so when he came home. Just as though Nave saw the apparition before him then, and was frightened at it.
"The rumour is infamous," he answered, biting his cold lips to keep down his passion. "Infamous and ridiculous both. Emanating from idle fools. I think, sir, as a magistrate, you might order these people before you and punish them."
"Punish people for thinking they see Caromel's ghost!" retorted the Squire. "Bless my heart! What an ignorant man (for a lawyer) you must be! No act has been passed against seeing ghosts. But I'd like to know what gives rise to the fancy about Caromel."
The rumour did not die away. How could it, when from time to time the thing continued to be seen? It frightened Mary Standish into a fit. Going to Caromel's Farm one night to beg grace for something or other that her ill-doing husband, Jim, then working on the farm, had done or left undone, she came upon a wonderfully thin man standing in the nook by the dairy window, and took him to be the bailiff, who was himself no better than a walking lamp-post. "If you please, sir," she was beginning, thinking to have it out with him instead of Mrs. Caromel, "if you please, sir----"
When, upon looking into his pale, stony face, she saw the late master. He vanished into air or into the wall, and down fell Mary Standish in a fainting-fit. The parish grew uneasy at all this--and wondered what had been done to Nash, or what he had done, that he could not rest.