The poor girl instinctively drew back; but the monster, letting go her wrist, caught hold of her by the hair, and, twisting her luxuriant tresses around his bony fingers, held her head as firmly as if in a vice. Then, with the other hand, he inserted the neck of the phial between her lips, and, forcing it through her teeth, poured a portion of the liquid down her throat.
There was no attempt to scream—scarce any at resistance—on the part of the young creole. Almost freely did she swallow the draught. So prostrate was her spirit at that moment, that she would scarce have cared to refuse it, even had she known it to be poison!
And not unlike to poison was the effect it produced—equally quick in subduing the senses—for what Chakra had thus administered was the juice of the calalue, the most powerful of narcotics.
In a few seconds after the fluid had passed her lips, the face of the young girl became overspread with a death-like pallor—all through her frame ran a gentle, tremulous quivering, that bespoke the sudden relaxation of the muscles. Her lithe limbs gave way beneath her; and she would have sunk down upon the floor, but for the supporting arm of the weird conjuror who had caused this singular collapse.
Into his arms she sank—evidently insensible—with the semblance rather of death than of sleep!
“Now, den!” muttered the myal-man, with no sign of astonishment at a phenomenon far from being strange to him—since it was to that same sleeping-spell he was indebted for his professional reputation—“now, den, ma sweet Lilly, you sleep quiet ’nuff ’till I want wake you ’gain. Not hya, howsomedever. You muss take you nap in de open air. A muss put you wha de ole Jew no see you, or maybe he want you fo’ himself. Come ’long, disaway!”
And thus idly apostrophising his unconscious victim, he lifted her in both arms, and carried her out of the hut.
Outside he paused, looking around, as if searching for some place in which to deposit his burden.
The moon was now above the horizon, and her beams were beginning to be reflected feebly, even through the sombre solitude of the Duppy’s Hole. A clump of low bushes, growing just outside the canopy of the cotton-tree, appeared to offer a place of concealment; and Chakra was proceeding towards them, when his eye fell upon the cascade; and, as if suddenly changing his design, he turned out of his former direction, and proceeded towards the waterfall.
On getting close up to the cliff over which the stream was precipitated, he paused for an instant on the edge of the seething cauldron; then, taking a fresh hold of the white, wan form that lay helpless over his arm, he glided behind the sheet of foaming water, and suddenly disappeared from the sight—like a river-demon of Eld, bearing off to his subaqueous cavern some beautiful victim, whom he had succeeded in enticing to his haunt, and entrancing into a slumber more fatal than death.