A quick resentment appeared on Ralph Pullen’s features. His eyes darkened, and an ominous wrinkle stood out on his brow.
“And what may you have to say of Miss Brandt?” he demanded, coldly.
“A great deal more than you know, or can possibly imagine! She is not a fit person for Elinor Leyton to associate with, and consequently, one whom it is your duty to avoid, instead of cultivating.”
“I think you exceed your duty, Doctor, in speaking to me thus!”
“I am sorry you should think so, Pullen, but your anger will not deter me from telling you what is in my mind. You must not forget how old a friend I am of both sides of your family. Your brother Arthur is one of my greatest chums, and his wife’s father was, without exception, my dearest friend—added to this, I am on intimate terms with the Walthamstowes. Knowing what I do, therefore, I should hold myself criminal if I left you in ignorance of the truth concerning this young woman.”
“Are you alluding, may I ask, to Miss Brandt?”
“I am alluding to the girl who calls herself by that name, but who is in reality only the bastard daughter of Henry Brandt, one of the most infamous men whom God ever permitted to desecrate this earth, and his half-caste mistress.”
“Be careful what you say, Doctor Phillips!” said Ralph Pullen, with ill-suppressed wrath gleaming in his blue eyes.
“There is no need to be, my dear fellow, I can verify everything I say, and I fear no man’s resentment. I was stationed in Jamaica with my regiment, some fifteen years ago, when this girl was a child of six years old, running half naked about her father’s plantation, uncared for by either parent, and associating solely with the negro servants. Brandt was a brute—the perpetrator of such atrocities in vivisection and other scientific experiments, that he was finally slaughtered on his own plantation by his servants, and everyone said it served him right. The mother was the most awful woman I have ever seen, and my experience of the sex in back slums and alleys has not been small. She was the daughter of a certain Judge Carey of Barbadoes by one of his slave girls, and Brandt took her as his mistress before she was fourteen. At thirty, when I saw her, she was a revolting spectacle. Gluttonous and obese—her large eyes rolling and her sensual lips protruding as if she were always licking them in anticipation of her prey. She was said to be ‘Obeah’ too by the natives and they ascribed all the deaths and diseases that took place on the plantation, to her malign influence. Consequently, when they got her in their clutches, I have heard that they did not spare her, but killed her in the most torturing fashion they could devise.”
“And did the British Government take no notice of the massacre?”