Then came the cook to her master, her mistress happened to be away.
“Massa,” said she, “Missus very fond of Gloriana.”
He acquiesced. The girl was a favourite with his wife.
“Massa,” pleaded the cook, “you send for Dr—————,” naming a mulatto doctor, a Creole, who had taken his degree in America, “he can cure Gloriana.”
Her master looked dubious. If the man with a good Edinburgh degree could do nothing, he had small faith in any other man. But the cook was determined. “Dr————— can cure.” Therelore Dr————— was sent for. Sure enough, the new man looked at the girl, heard the story, went round the garden, gathered a leaf here and a leaf there, made a decoction which the girl drank, and presently she was well again. The Creole had lived in the island, and had grown up in the ways of the negroes.
But Obeah so used is certainly a very terrible thing, and not to be made light of or trifled with.
For the man of African descent, light-hearted and happy soul as he is, has another side to his character which must not be overlooked, and which has its influence on his life. Ever and again it peeps out.
One day Miss Maxwell Hall, riding among the hills, came upon, as she had done hundreds of times before, a pleasant little river which full to the brim, for the rains had been heavy, wandered along between plantations of sugar-cane. Presently she came to a gate, and as it had never occurred to her to do before, she opened it and rode in. The river widened, the hills closed in, and the trees grew denser, and she found herself riding along a dank, dark path overhung with rose-apple trees and mangoes, and as these trees do when it is very damp, all the leaves were turning black and covered with mildew, the river ended in a dark pool underneath, a pool of deep, black water that poured itself away underground. The ground was sodden and wet, and reeking of decay. The air was heavy and contaminated, and the black leaves of the rose-apple trees shut out the light and were themselves apparently lifeless, or perhaps rather they were reeking with a sinister, evil life. Had she found a pool where witches met, or where the Obeah men wove their ghastly spells? Her very horse's hoof-beats were muffled in the foul and rotten vegetation underfoot.
She made her way back into the brilliant tropical sunshine, which was but a little way off. Leaning against the gate was a man idly chewing a bit of sugar-cane.
“What place is that?” she asked.