‘Rosa, you must be dreaming. You are lying to me,’ said Henri de Courcelles, suddenly alive to the danger of the girl’s discovery. ‘How can Miss Liz have a baby at the bungalow?’
‘Ah, Missy Liz knows that best herself,’ replied the yellow girl, with an oracular nod; ‘but it’s God’s truth, all de same, Massa, and dere’s not much difference ’tween white gal and yaller gal, after all. Miss Liz berry angry with me because little Carlo come a bit too soon, but dere’s a baby come to her now, and I shall have my revenge.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense!’ exclaimed De Courcelles; ‘and don’t presume to speak to me in that way of Miss Liz.’
But though he affected to be angry, he saw a light glimmering through the clouds of perplexity that overshadowed him, all the same. What if this child—for he could not doubt which child Rosa meant—should be taken by the plantation hands for Lizzie’s? How fortunately the circumstance would divert public suspicion from his poor Maraquita! It never occurred to him what a piece of dastardly cruelty it would be to shift the blame from one woman to the other, so selfish does the madness of passion render us. But he could not understand how the infant came to be at the bungalow, and he was painfully curious on the subject.
‘Massa Courcelles not believe me?’ continued Rosa, as they drew in sight of Lizzie’s window; ‘then Massa just come here and look for himself.’
The yellow girl was standing before the open casement, and beckoning to him as she spoke, and something stronger than mere curiosity urged him to obey her summons. He drew near on tiptoe, and peeped in. The infant was still lying on the bed, its tiny face uncovered to the air.
De Courcelles was not a man much subject to the softer emotions, but as he looked at it, he trembled. In another moment he had started backwards, for the bedroom door opened, and Lizzie herself appeared upon the threshold, and, taking up the baby, carried it into the outer room.
‘Now do you believe I telling lies?’ exclaimed Rosa triumphantly, as she looked up into the overseer’s pale face; and before he could prevent her, she had run round the house, and in at the front door.
Fearful of what discovery might follow her intrusion, De Courcelles hurried after her, and arrived just in time to see the mock curtsey which she dropped to the Doctor’s daughter. Lizzie herself, taken at a disadvantage, and utterly unprepared at that early hour of the morning for visitors, was standing by the table, white as a sheet, holding the baby in her arms, and apparently unable to say a word.
‘Good morning, Miss Lizzie!’ cried Rosa, with another deep reverence. ‘Massa Courcelles and I jest come round to see you and de new baby, and to ask how you both do to-day.’