Isaac Pourtalès made a wry face aside to himself. Evidently he had settled in his own mind that whatever might be Delgado’s private opinion about the friends of the Lord’s friend, he himself was not going to be bound, when the moment for action actually arrived, by anybody else’s ideas of promises.
By-and-by, Rosina rose to go. ‘You is comin’ wit me, Isaac?’ she asked coquettishly, with her finger stuck once more in coy reserve at the corner of her mouth, and her head a little on one side, bewitching negress fashion.
Isaac hesitated; it does not do for a brown man to be too condescending and familiar with a nigger girl, even if she does happen to be his sweetheart. Besides, Delgado signed to him with his withered finger that he wanted him to stop a few minutes longer. ‘No, Missy Rosie,’ the mulatto answered, yawning quietly; ‘I doan’t gwine yet. You know de road to house, I tink. Ebenin’, le-ady.’
Rosina gave a sighing, sidelong look of disappointed affection, took her lover’s hand a little coldly in her own black fingers, and sidled out of the hut with much reluctance, half-frightened still at the horrid prospect of once more facing alone the irrepressible and ubiquitous ghouls.
As soon as she was fairly out of earshot, Louis Delgado approached at once close to the mulatto’s ear and murmured in a mysterious hollow undertone: ‘Next Wednesday.’
The mulatto started. ‘So soon as dat!’ he cried. ‘Den you has got de pistols?’
Delgado, with his wrinkled finger placed upon his lip, moved stealthily to a corner of his hut, and slowly opened a chest, occupied on the top by his mouldy obeah mummery of loose alligators’ teeth and well-cleaned little human knuckle-bones. Carefully removing this superstitious rubbish from the top of the box with an undisguised sneer—for Isaac as a brown man was ex officio superior to obeah—he took from beneath it a couple of dozen old navy pistols, of a disused pattern, bought cheap from a marine store-dealer of doubtful honesty down at the harbour. Isaac’s eyes gleamed brightly as soon as he saw the goodly array of real firearms. ‘Hé, hé!’ he cried joyously, fingering the triggers with a loving touch, ‘dat de ting to bring down de pride ob de proud buckra. Ha, ha! Next Wednesday, next Wednesday! We waited long, Mistah Delgado, for de Lard’s delibberance; but de time come now, de time come at last, sah, an’ we gwine to hab de island ob Trinidad all to ourselves.’
The old African bowed majestically. ‘Slay ebbery male among dem,’ he answered aloud in his deepest accents, with a not wholly unimpressive mouthing of his hollow vowels—‘slay ebbery male, an’ take de women captive, an’ de maidens, an’ de little ones; an’ divide among you de spoil ob all deir cattle, an’ all deir flocks, an’ all deir goods, an’ deir cities wherein dey dwell, an’ all deir vineyards, an’ deir goodly castles.’
Isaac Pourtalès’ eyes gleamed hideously as he listened in delight to that awful quotation.