The summer spent itself with no further eventfulness except in the
matter of ghosts.
Many people, perhaps most, do not believe in ghosts, but Mermaid did
and so did her Dad. Uncle Ho was well acquainted with the principal
ghosts peopling the beach. Keturah Hand ridiculed the idea of their
existence. In general, those who had lived on the beach for any length
of time were believers or of open mind; those whose visits to the
beach had been confined chiefly to all-day picnics thought the legends
nonsense.
“Captain Kidd,” stated Keturah, “may have buried a chest of treasure
in the bald-headed dune with the very steep slope. I know my father
used to tell of people digging there to recover it. Kidd was certainly
round about here in the _Quedagh Merchant_ or the _Antonio_; and
everybody knows that he stopped at Gardiner’s Island and got supplies
and presented Mrs. Gardiner with a bolt of--calico, wasn’t it? If he
buried a chest in that dune over there, he, or his crew, certainly
may have killed a gigantic negro, spilling his blood over the chest
so that his wraith would guard the treasure. I think it likely that
the crew did it. Seamen are always so superstitious.” Here she looked
pointedly at her husband, an ex-sailor. “Hosea here, just because they
used to cut a cross in the mast to bring a fair wind, started carving
the bedpost the other day so the wind would blow from the southwest
instead of the north. Kidd was, or had been, too much of a gentleman to
entertain such low ideas; and if his crew killed the negro and spilled
his blood I fancy he washed his hands of it.”
“Of the blood?” interpolated Ho Ha, innocently. His wife looked at him
sharply and, without answering, went on:
“But when it comes to that negro’s spirit guarding the treasure, and
when it comes to dark, swarthy Spanish ghosts with rings in their ears;
and drowned sailors in flapping dungaree trousers, and ghosts of old
sea captains, lost passengers, and Heaven knows who else, I, for one,
don’t take the least stock in them.”
“Don’t you believe in the Duneswoman, Aunt Keturah?” inquired Mermaid.
“No, not in a Dunesman, nor in the Dunes children, unless you mean
those eighteen children of old Jacob Biggles that were named after
wrecks and ragged as ghosts,” Mrs. Hand retorted.
“But, Aunt, I’ve seen the Duneswoman,” protested Mermaid. “So has Dad.”
“All you’ve seen is a face and an arm,” corrected Mrs. Hand. “And I
can’t find any one else who has seen as much as that. A face and an arm
are not a ghost. They’re a--I don’t know what,” she finished.
“A hallucination,” Mermaid offered.
“A hallelujah. That’s what you say when you see one. You say
‘Hallelujah!’” came from Ho Ha.
“When I see one I may say something even more remarkable,” his wife
responded, grimly.
It was several nights later when she awoke and uttered a long-drawn
scream of terror.
“Hosea!” she cried, clutching her pillow. “Hosea, there’s someone at
the window!”
Ho Ha leaped up manfully, went to the window, stuck his head through
the netting which was tacked on as a screen, and drew it in again.
“Nonsense, Keturah,” he said, gently. “No one in sight except Captain
Vanton standing on the dune in front of his house.” The Vanton cottage
was a dune away, but a valley lay between. “You--why, you must have
seen a ghost. Oh, ho-ho-ho!”
He communicated the nature of the disturbance to Mermaid in the next
room, and when Cap’n Smiley, who slept at the station, came over for
breakfast next morning, there was some chaffing about the ghost Keturah
had seen.
“I certainly saw something,” said Mrs. Hand, emphatically. “And if it
was a ghost it was the ghost of a live man. It had sidewhiskers exactly
like Captain Vanton! You all know he prowls around at night. There’s
something mighty queer about it; but then, everything about that man
is queer. When it comes to his looking in my bedroom window, though, I
think I shall do something.”
“Oh, pshaw, Keturah,” said her brother. “Vanton may be a peculiar
fellow, but it’s not likely he walks by your windows. At two in the
morning, anyway.”
“You seem to think I have nothing he might covet, John, but I have a
few trinkets that anybody would set a value to!”
“Is that why you hugged your pillow?” inquired her husband, innocently.
Keturah gave a little jump and looked about her nervously, a
performance entirely contrary to her nature. As if she realized that
she had betrayed herself she said, finally: “Well, I wasn’t going to
say anything about it but I did bring my stones over here. I felt it
wasn’t safe to leave ’em in Blue Port, and of course I sleep with ’em
under my head.”
“Stones?” exclaimed Mermaid in mystification. “You don’t mean jewels,
do you, Aunt Keturah?”
“Of course I mean jewels,” replied Mrs. Hand, with some asperity.
“I’ve never told you anything about them--young people get their heads
turned with such things--but I have every one of the stones that
belonged to my aunt, Keturah Hawkins, Captain Hawkins’s wife; and I
also have the stones that belong in settings in the curios and things
in our parlour. There’s quite a lot of them, and if I weren’t used to a
hard pillow I daresay I’d not be able to sleep a wink.”
“Oh, Aunt, may I see them?”
“I suppose you may, though it’s a lot of trouble to get them out. It’s
risky, too, for some of the littler ones might roll away and get lost,”
commented Mrs. Hand.
After breakfast she brought out her pillow and exposed the contents
to the two men and the girl. John Smiley had seen the jewels, though
not for many years. Ho Ha knew of their existence, but had never seen
them and had supposed them secreted in Blue Port. To Mermaid their very
existence was a revelation, and their beauty a greater one.
All kinds of jewels seemed to be represented, and there were also
Eastern stones which none of the four could name. Sapphires were
especially abundant, very large ones, of darkest blue. They had been
Keturah Hawkins’s favourites, but Mermaid worshipped the emeralds which
she knew she could have worn in her hair, and the diamonds which would
have been no more brilliant than her blue eyes. There were wonderful
pearls which needed to be worn to regain their finest lustre, and there
were rubies of as dark a hue as the blood that must have been shed for
them. The majority of the gems were loose; the pearls were roped,
however, and there were a few bracelets and other simple ornaments. All
the settings were old and Eastern, suggestive of bare arms and bare
necks--bare ankles, too. At least one of the ornaments was an anklet,
they conjectured. Where Captain Hawkins had got them Keturah Hand was
unable to say. He had, she supposed, picked them up at various times
and in many places. He had visited, in his career, every port from
Bombay to Tientsin; Ceylon, Madagascar, and South Africa; Peru he had
touched at more than once. And he had sometimes done business by barter.
After they had admired the jewels Keturah, with Mermaid’s help, checked
them off on a list she had and restored them to their hiding place.
The next night, after they had spent the day on the bay in Cap’n
Smiley’s small sailboat, pillow and all were gone.