CHAPTER XXX.
That evening, Rosina Fleming went as she was bid to the old African’s tent about half-past eleven, groping her way along the black moonless roads in fear and trembling, with infinite terror of the all-pervading and utterly ghastly West Indian ghosts or duppies. It was a fearful thing to go at that time of night to the hut of an obeah man; heaven knows what grinning, gibbering ghouls and phantoms one might chance to come across in such a place at such an hour. But it would have been more fearful still to stop away; for Delgado, who could so easily bring her Isaac Pourtalès for a lover by his powerful spells, could just as easily burn her to powder with his thunder and lightning, or send the awful duppies to torment her in her bed, as she lay awake trembling through the night-watches. So poor Rosina groped her way fearfully round to Delgado’s hut with wild misgivings, and lifted the latch with quivering fingers, when she heard its owner’s gruff, ‘Come in den, missy,’ echoing grimly from the inner recesses.
When she opened the door, however, she was somewhat relieved to find within a paraffin lamp burning brightly; and in place of ghouls or ghosts or duppies, Isaac Pourtalès himself, jauntily seated smoking a fresh tobacco-leaf cigarette of his own manufacture, in the corner of the hut where Louis Delgado was sitting cross-legged on the mud floor.
‘Ebenin’, missy,’ Delgado said, rising with African politeness to greet her; while the brown Barbadian, without moving from his seat, allowed his lady-love to stoop down of herself to kiss him affectionately. ‘I send for you dis ebenin’ becase we want to know suffin’ about dis pusson dat callin’ himself buckra, an’ stoppin’ now at Orange Grobe wit you. What you know about him, tell us dat, missy. You is Missy Dupuy own serbin’-le-ady: him gwine to tell you all him secret. What you know about dis pusson Noel?’
Thus adjured, Rosina Fleming, sitting down awkwardly on the side of the rude wooden settee, and with her big white eyes fixed abstractedly upon the grinning skull that decorated the bare mud wall just opposite her, pulled her turban straight upon her woolly locks with coquettish precision, and sticking one finger up to her mouth like a country child, began to pour forth all she could remember of the Orange Grove servants’ gossip about Harry Noel. Delgado listened impatiently to the long recital without ever for a moment trying to interrupt her; for long experience had taught him the lesson that little was to be got out of his fellow-countrywomen by deliberate cross-questioning, but a great deal by allowing them quietly to tell their own stories at full length in their own rambling, childish fashion.
At last, when Rosina, with eyes kept always timidly askance, half the time upon the frightful skull, and half the time on Isaac Pourtalès, had fairly come to the end of her tether, the old African ventured, with tentative cunning, to put a leading question: ‘You ebber hear dem say at de table, missy, who him mudder and fader is, and where dem come from?’
‘Him fader is very great gentleman ober in Englan’,’ Rosina answered confidently—‘very grand gentleman, wit house an’ serbant, an’ coach an’ horses, an’ plenty cane-piece, an’ rum an’ sugar, an’ yam garden an’ plantain, becase I ’member Aunt Clemmy say so; an’ de missy him say so himself too, sah. An’ de missy say dat de pusson dat marry him will be real le-ady—same like de gubbernor le-ady; real le-ady, like dem hab in Englan’. De missy tellin’ me all about him dis bery ebenin’.’
Delgado smiled. ‘Den de missy in lub wit him himself, for certain,’ he answered with true African shrewdness and cynicism. ‘Ole-time folk has proverb, “When naygur woman say, ‘Dat fowl fat,’ him gwine to steal him same ebenin’ for him pickany dinner.” An’ when le-ady tell you what happen to gal dat marry gentleman, him want to hab de gentleman himself for him own husband.’
‘O no, sah; dat doan’t so,’ Rosina cried with sudden energy. ‘De missy doan’t lubbin’ de buckra gentleman at all. She tell me him look altogedder too much like naygur.’
Delgado and Pourtalès exchanged meaning looks with one another, but neither of them answered a word to Rosina.