INTRODUCTION OF THE CONTRABAND, WITH SOME REFLECTIONS THEREON--THREE
MONTHS BEFORE--AUNT SYNCHY AND THE OBI POISONING--A NICE LITTLE
ARRANGEMENT OF EGBERT CRAWFORD'S.
Here it becomes necessary to pause and introduce a new and altogether
indispensable character. Not new to the world--sorrow for the world that
it is not! Not new to the country--wo to the country that it has filled
so large a place in its history! But something new in this veracious
narration--the _contraband_. The negro must come in, by all means and at
all hazards. Time was when romances and even histories could be written
without such an introduction; but that time is past and perhaps past
forever. "I and Napoleon," said the courier of Arves, relating some
incident in which he had temporarily become associated with the fortunes
of the Great Captain; and "I and the white man" may Sambo say at no
distant day, without presumption and without outraging the dignity of
position. It was a very harmless monster that Frankenstein constructed,
apparently; but it grew to be a very fearful and tyrannical monster
before he was quite done with it. No doubt the first black face that
grinned on the Virginian shore, a couple of centuries ago, seemed more
an object of mirth than of terror--and it certainly gave promise of
profit. But he is a man of mirthful disposition who sees anything to
laugh at in the same black face, grown older and broader and much less
comical, on the shore of the same Virginia to-day. The white race and
the black--the sharp profile and the broad lip--the springing instep and
the protuberant heel--have been having a long tussle, with the
probabilities for a while all on the side of the white: to-day the
struggle is doubtful if not decided in favor of the black. "Here we go,
up--up--uppy! Here we go, down--down--downy!" the children used to sing
when playing see-saw with a broad plank on the fence; and _they_
understood, what their elders sometimes forget--that the rebound of
extreme height is descent. One more illustration, before this train of
thought necessarily ceases.
Is it not recorded in all the books of relative history, that the
Normans, under William the Conqueror, invaded and subjugated Saxon
England and made virtual slaves of the unfortunate countrymen of Harold?
Yet who were the conquered eventually? England was Saxon within fifty
years of Hastings: England is Saxon to-day. The broad bosom of the Saxon
mother, even when the sire of her child was a ravisher, gave out drops
of strength that moulded it in spite of him, to be at last her avenger
and his master! The Saxon pirate still sweeps the seas in his
descendants: the Norman robber is only heard of at long intervals when
he meets his opportunity at a Balaklava. The revenges of history are
fearful; and if the end of human experience is not reached in our
downfall, other races will be careful never to rivet a chain of caste or
color, or so to rivet it that no meddling fingers of fanaticism can ever
unloose the shackle!
Perhaps it is proper as well as inevitable that the negro should have
changed his place and mounted astride of the national neck instead of
being trodden under the national foot. Everything else in our
surroundings has changed--why not he? We do not yet quite understand the
fact--it may be; but the foundations of the old in society have been
broken up as effectually, within the past two years, as were those of
the great deep at the time of Noah's flood. The old deities of fashion
have been swept away in the flood of revolution. The millionaire of two
years ago, intent at that time on the means by which the revenues from
his brown-stone houses and pet railroad stocks could be spent to the
most showy advantage, has become the struggling man of to-day, intent
upon keeping up appearances, and happy if diminished and doubtful rents
can even be made to meet increasing taxes. The struggling man of that
time has meanwhile sprung into fortune and position, through lucky
adventures in government transportations or army-contracts; and the
jewelers of Broadway and Chestnut Street are busy resetting the diamonds
of decayed families, to sparkle on brows and bosoms that only a little
while ago beat with pride at an added weight of California paste or
Kentucky rock-crystal. The most showy equipages that flashed last summer
at Newport and Saratoga, were never seen between the bathing-beach and
Fort Adams, or between Congress Spring and the Lake, in the old days;
and on the "Dinorah" nights at the Academy[4] there have been new faces
in the most prominent boxes, almost as _outre_ and unaccustomed in their
appearance as was that of the hard-featured Western President, framed in
a shock head and a turn-down collar, meeting the gaze of astonished
Murray Hill, when he passed an hour there on his way to the
inauguration.
[Footnote 4: December 1862.]
Quite as notable a change has taken place in personal reputation. Many
of the men on whom the country depended as most likely to prove able
defenders in the day of need, have not only discovered to the world
their worthlessness, but filled up the fable of the man who leaned upon
a reed, by fatally piercing those whom they had betrayed to their fall.
Bubble-characters have burst, and high-sounding phrases have been
exploded. Men whose education and antecedents should have made them
brave and true, have shown themselves false and cowardly--impotent for
good, and active only for evil. Unconsidered nobodies have meanwhile
sprung forth from the mass of the people, and equally astonished
themselves and others by the power, wisdom and courage they have
displayed. In cabinet and camp, in army and navy, in the editorial chair
and in the halls of eloquence, the men from whom least was expected have
done most, and those upon whom the greatest expectations had been
founded have only given another proof of the fallacy of all human
calculations. All has been change, all has been transition, in the
estimation men have held of themselves and the light in which they
presented themselves to each other.
Opinions of duties and recognitions of necessities have known a change
not less remarkable. What yesterday we believed to be fallacy, to-day we
know to be the truth. What seemed the fixed and immutable purpose of God
only a few short months ago, we have already discovered to have been
founded only in human passion or ambition. What seemed eternal has
passed away, and what appeared to be evanescent has assumed stability.
The storm has been raging around us, and doing its work not the less
destructively because we failed to perceive that we were passing through
anything more threatening than a summer shower. While we have stood upon
the bank of the swelling river, and pointed to some structure of old
rising on the bank, declaring that not a stone could be moved until the
very heavens should fall, little by little the foundations have been
undermined, and the full crash of its falling has first awoke us from
our security. That without which we said that the nation could not live,
has fallen and been destroyed; and yet we know not whether the nation
dies, or grows to a better and more enduring life. What we cherished we
have lost; what we did not ask or expect has come to us; the effete but
reliable old is passing away, and out of the ashes of its decay is
springing forth a new so unexpected and so little prepared for that it
may be salvation or destruction as the hand of God shall rule. The past
of the nation lies with the sunken Cumberland in the waters of Hampton
Roads; its future floats about in a new-fangled Monitor, that may combat
and defeat the navies of the world or go to the bottom with one
inglorious plunge.[5] And this general transition brings us back to the
negro, whose apotheosis is after all only a part of the inevitable, and
may be only the flash before his final and welcome disappearance.
[Footnote 5: Written three days before the foundering of the Monitor off
Hatteras, Dec. 31st 1862.]
Our contraband is a woman, and she comes upon the scene of action in
this wise, retrospectively.
Some three months before the events recorded in the preceding chapters,
to wit about the middle of March, Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, doing a
thriving business in the line especially affected by such gentry, and
not yet elevated to a Colonel's commission in the volunteer army by the
parental forethought of Governor Edwin D. Morgan,--had occasion to visit
that portion of Thomas Street lying between West Broadway and Hudson.
The locality is not by any means a pleasant one, either for the eye or
the other senses, and the character of the street is not materially
improved by the recollection of the Ellen Jewett murder, which occurred
on the south side, within a few doors of Hudson. Garbage left unremoved
by Hackley festers alike on pavement, sidewalk and gutter; and a mass of
black and white humanity (the former predominating) left unremoved by
the civilization of New York in the last half of the nineteenth century,
festers within the crazy and tumble-down tenements. Colored cotton
handkerchiefs wrapping woolly heads, and shoes slouched at the heel
furnishing doubtful covering to feet redolent of filth and crippled by
disease--alternate with the scanty habiliments of black and white
children, brought up in the kennel and reduced by blows, mud and
exposure to a woful similarity of hue. The whiskey bottle generally
accompanies the basket with a quart of decayed potatoes, from the
grocery at the corner; and even the begged calf's-liver or the stolen
beef-bone comes home accompanied by a flavor of bad gin. It is no wonder
that the few shutters hang by the eye-lids, and that even the wagon-boys
who vend antediluvian vegetables from castaway wagons drawn by
twenty-shilling horse-frames, hurry through without any hope in the
yells intended to attract custom.
Any observer who should have seen the neatly-dressed lawyer peering into
the broken doors and up the black staircases of Thomas Street, would
naturally have supposed his visit connected with some revelation of
crime, and that he was either looking up a witness whose testimony might
be necessary to save a perilled burglar from Sing Sing, or taking
measures to keep one hidden who might have told too much if brought upon
the witness-stand. And yet Egbert Crawford was really visiting that den
of black squalor with a very different object--to find an old darkey
woman who was reported as living in that street, and in his capacity as
one of the eleven hundred and fifty Commissioners of Deeds of the City
and County of New York, to procure her "X mark" and take her
acknowledgment in the little matter of a quitclaim deed. A very harmless
purpose, in itself, certainly; and yet the observer might have been
nearer right in his suspicion than even the lawyer himself believed,
when the whole result of the visit was taken into account.
One of the ricketty houses on the south side of the street, not far from
the Ellen Jewett house, and not much further from the equally celebrated
panel-house which furnished the weekly papers with illustrations of that
peculiar species of man-trap a few years ago--seemed to the seeker to
bear out the description that had been given him. The door was wide
open, and all within appeared to be a sort of dark cabin out of which
issued occasional sounds of quarrelling voices and continual puffs of
fetid air foul enough to sicken the strongest stomach. He went in, as
one of the lost might go into Pandemonium, impelled by an imperious
necessity. He mounted the ricketty and creaking stair, with the
bannister half gone and the steps groaning beneath his tread as if they
contained the spirits of the dead respectability that had left them half
a century before. He had been told that the old woman lived on the third
floor, and though he met no one he concluded to dare the perils of a
second ascent, in spite of the landing place being in almost pitchy
darkness. Rushing along with a hasty step that even the gloom could not
make a slower one, he felt something bump against his knees and the
lower part of his body, and then something human fell to the floor with
a crash that had the jingling of broken crockery blended with it.
"Boo! hoo! hoo! e-e-e-gh! Mammy! Mammy!" yelled a voice. "Boo! hoo! hoo!
e-e-e-gh! Mammy! Mammy!" and Crawford could just discern that he had run
over and partially demolished a little negro boy carrying a pitcher, the
pitcher and the boy seeming to have suffered about equally. Neither of
them had any nose left, to speak of; and the little imp did not make any
effort to rise from the floor, but lay there and yelled merrily. The
victor in the collision did not have much time for inspection, for the
moment after a door at the back end of the passage opened hurriedly, and
a hideous old negro woman came rushing out, with a sputtering fragment
of lighted tallow-candle in her hand, and exclaiming:
"What's de matter, Jeffy? Here am Mamma!"
"Big man run'd ober me! broke de pitcher! Boo! hoo! hoo!" yelled the
black atom in reply, without any additional effort at getting up.
"Get out ob dar! d--n you, I run'd ober _you_, mind dat!" screeched out
the old woman, catching sight of the dark form of Crawford. "Hurtin'
leetle boys!--I pay you for it, honey!"
"I hit him accidentally," said the lawyer, who had no intention of
getting into a row in that "negro quarter." "It was dark, and I did not
see him. I'll pay for the pitcher."
"Will you, honey?" said the old woman, mollifying instantly. "Well den,
'spose you couldn't help it. Get up, Jeffy."
"Can you tell me whether Mrs. ---- lives on any of the floors of this
house?" asked Crawford.
"Nebber mind dat, till you gib me de money!" answered the old woman, not
to be diverted by any side-issues. "Dat are pitcher cost a quarter,
honey!"
Crawford was feeling in his pocket for one of the quarters that yet
remained in that receptacle, preparatory to going out of circulation
altogether,--when the old crone, eager for the money, stuck her candle
somewhat nearer his face than it had before been held. Instantly her
withered face assumed a new expression of intelligence, and her hand
shook so that she almost dropped the candle, as she cried:
"Merciful Lord and Marser! If dat are ain't young Egbert Crawford!"
"My name is certainly Egbert Crawford!" said that individual, very much
surprised in his turn. "But who are you that know _me_?"
"Don't know his ole Aunt Synchy!" exclaimed the old woman.
"Aunt Synchy! Aunt Synchy!" said the lawyer, trying to recollect the
past very rapidly, and catching some glimmers. "What? Aunt Synchy that
used to live at--"
"Used to live at old Tom Crawford's. Lor bress you, yes! Why come in,
honey!" and before the lawyer could answer further, he was literally
dragged through the dingy door by the still vigorous old woman, and
found himself inside her apartment, Master Jeffy and his pitcher being
left neglected on the entry floor.
Once within the door, and in the better light afforded even by the dingy
windows, Crawford had a better opportunity to observe the old woman, and
he now found no difficulty in recalling something more than the name.
She might have been sixty-five or seventy years of age, to judge by the
wrinkles on her face and the white of her eyebrows, though her hair was
hidden under a gaudy and dirty cotton plaid handkerchief and her tall
form seemed little bowed by age. Two coal-black eyes, showing no
diminution of their natural fire, gleamed from under those white
eyebrows; and on the portions of the cheeks yet left smooth enough to
show the texture of the skin, there were deep gashes that had once been
the tattooing of her barbarian youth and beauty. Her hands were
withered, much more than her face, and seemed skinny and claw-like. Her
dress, which had once been plaid cotton gingham, was fearfully dirty and
unskilfully patched with other material; and the frayed silk shawl
thrown around her old shoulders might have been rescued from a rag-heap
in the streets to serve that turn.
The room, as Crawford readily noticed, was almost as remarkable in
appearance as the old woman herself. There was nothing singular in the
bare floor, the pine table and two or three broken chairs; for something
very like them, or worse, can be found in almost every miserable
tenement where virtue struggles or vice swelters, in the slums of the
great city. Neither was there anything notable in the smoke-greased
walls and ceiling, the miserable fire-place with one cracked kettle and
a red earthen bowl, and the wretched bed of rags stuck away in one of
the corners, on which evidently both the old crone and Master Jeffy made
their sad pretence at sleep.
But what really was singular in the appearance of the apartment, and
what Crawford noted at once, although he did not allude to it until
afterwards, was--first, a ghastly attempt at painting, hanging behind
the chimney, representing a death's-head and cross-bones, which might
have been executed by an artist in whitewash, on a ground of black
muslin. Second, a hanging shelf in one corner, with a dozen or two of
dingy small bottles and vials, and a rod lying across it, apparently
made from a black birchen switch, peeled in sections. Third, and most
important of all, a string of twine suspended from one side of the room
to the other, in front of the fire-place and near the ceiling, and hung
with objects that required a moment to recognize. Among them, when
closely examined, could be found two or three bats, dried; a string of
snake's eggs, blackened by being smoked; a tail and two legs of a black
cat; a bunch of the dried leaves of the black hellebore; a snake's
skin--not the "shedder" or superficial skin, but the cuticle itself,
peeled from the writhing reptile; two objects that might have been
spotted toads, run over by wagons until thoroughly flattened--then
dried; and one object which could not well be anything more or less than
the hand of a child a few weeks old, cut off just above the wrist and
subjected to some kind of embalming or drying process.
The purposes of this narrative do not require the recording of all the
conversation which took place between the Tombs lawyer and Aunt Synchy,
when the latter had dusted off one of the miserable chairs and forced
the former down into it, taking another herself, sitting square in front
of him, and thrusting her face so close into his that the withered
features seemed almost plastered against his own. It is enough to say
that that conversation corroborated the suspicion which the first words
of the crone would have engendered--that Aunt Synchy, in her younger
days, had been a slave in the Crawford family, in a neighboring State
where the institution had not yet been entirely abolished--and that, at
last manumitted by a mistaken kindness, she had finally wandered away to
the crime and misery of negro life in the great city. She retained, as
people of that feudal class always do, a vivid recollection of her early
life and of all the residents of the section where she had lived; and
Egbert Crawford, who was in the habit of putting many questions to
others, was not in the habit of answering quite so many as the old woman
put to him concerning the intermediate histories of the families of
which she had now lost sight for more than a quarter of a century.
In this conversation it became apparent, too, that Thomas Crawford, the
father of Egbert, had been the quasi owner of Synchy, and that she
retained for the son something of that singular attachment which appears
to be inseparable from any description of feudality. Thomas Crawford, it
would appear, had had two brothers, Richard, the father of the present
Richard Crawford and of John, the soldier, both Thomas and Richard being
then dead and their families in the country broken up. Another brother,
John, had become very wealthy, and appeared to be living, with Mary, an
only daughter, at West Falls, in the Oneida Valley. Finally, it became
quite apparent that the old crone, whatever her attachment to the family
of Thomas Crawford, did not hold the same feudal regard for some of the
other members of the family--in short, that she had retained the memory
of certain supposed early slights and injuries, quite as closely as she
had done the softer and more grateful sentiments towards others.
"So Dick am rich, am he, honey? an you am poor? Tut! tut! dat is too bad
for de son of ole Marser Tom!" said the old crone, after the lapse of
half an hour in which both tongues had been running pretty rapidly.
"He is," said Crawford, his face expressing no strong sense of
satisfaction at the recollection. "He bought property in the new parts
of the city, twelve or fifteen years ago, and the rise has been so great
that it has made him rich. He is now living on Murray Hill, in style,
though, d--n him!" and the face now was very sinister indeed, "he has
been attacked with inflammatory rheumatism and confined for some weeks
to his house, so that I don't think he enjoys it all very much."
"An Uncle John's big property," the old woman went on--"Dick is to have
all dat, too, you tink?"
"Yes, and Mary," answered Crawford. "Mary is a pretty little girl, and
worth as much as all the property. Dick has managed to get around the
old man, somehow, and if I can't stop it--"
"Eh, yes, if you can't stop 'um!" said the old crone, rubbing her skinny
hands together as if this, at least, pleased her. "Has you tried,
honey?"
Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, as has before been said, was much more in
the habit of putting others under close cross-examination, than allowing
himself to be subjected to the same sifting process. But whether he had
his own motives for telling the old woman the truth, or whether he saw
that those coal black old eyes were looking through him and divining all
that he wished or intended--he certainly submitted to the question and
told the truth, in the present instance:
"Yes, d--n him once more!"
"You want Mary and de property bofe?" asked the old woman again.
"Both!" answered the lawyer, after one more instant of hesitation and
one more glance into the coal black eyes. "I don't care if you know all
about it--you _daren't_ betray me, for your life!"
"Don't _want_ to, honey!" was all the old woman's reply; and the lawyer
went on:
"I have been twice up at West Falls since Dick was taken ill, and I
think I have set some reports in circulation there, that may make Miss
Mary hesitate, if they do not change the old man's will. How will that
do, Aunt Synchy--you old black anatomy? Eh?"
"Spose I am an 'atomy," said the old woman, apparently rather pleased
with the epithet than otherwise. "But Lor' bress you, chile, dat won't
do at all! You ain't ole enough yet!" and there was an unmistakable
sneer on the withered black face, to think that any body could be so
verdant.
"Ah!" said Egbert Crawford, who neither liked the sneer nor the
intimation. "What more could I do, I should like to know?"
What was it that Jeremy Taylor said--that old silver-tongued Bishop of
Down, Connor and Dromore, in Ireland?--"No disease cometh so much with
our breath, drinking from the infected lips of others, as with the
vessels of our own bodies that are ready to receive it." Shakspeare
says the same thing of mirth, when he records that
"A jest's prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it."
Artemus Ward, when he sets whole audiences into broad roars of laughter
over his odd conceits of "carrying peppermint to General Price" or
"going to be measured for an umbrella," may doubt the truth of this
assertion; and Lester Wallack or Ned Sothern, when inspiring chuckles
that almost threaten the life, may share in the infidelity: but let all
these remember that their audiences _come_ to be amused, and that their
best drolleries might fall very flat indeed at a Quaker meeting or in a
hospital devoted to men with the jumping tooth-ache! The conditions of
Crime are like those of Disease and Mirth--the patient must be ready
before the inoculation can take place. Eve was unquestionably wishing
for a break in the already dull routine of her life in Eden, before the
Serpent dared to make his appearance; and Arnold had some treason
crudely floating through his mind, even if not that particular treason,
before the overtures of the British commander led him to the attempted
betrayal of the Key of the Highlands. Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer,
when he said to Aunt Synchy, "What more could I do, I should like to
know?" meant to be understood as asserting that nothing more was in his
power; but there was really in his heart the wish for aid in some higher
crime to effect his purposes; and the tempter came!
"All dat goin' away from you, and nobody in de way but dat miserable
chile!" was the only comment of the old woman on Crawford's last
question.
"So I suppose," was the puzzled answer.
"Why don't you have a good doctor for him, honey!" asked the old woman,
next.
"A good doctor?" queried Crawford, still more puzzled. "Why curse it,
woman, what are you talking about? Won't he get well too soon, now, and
perhaps be up at West Falls before I am more than half ready for him?"
"Oh, you poor chile--you don't half understan' dis ole woman!" chuckled
the crone, delighted to find that she had puzzled the lawyer. "Spose de
good doctor so good that he nebber get well? Eh, honey?"
"What? poison?" broke out the lawyer, catching at the old woman's
meaning so suddenly that he could not quite control his voice.
"Hush-h-h! you fool!" hissed the old woman, rising at once, hobbling to
the door and opening it suddenly--then closing it and returning to her
chair. "You call yourself a lawyer, honey, and do such things as dat
'are? Done you know dem policers are sneakin' aroun' ebberywhere, up de
stairways as well as ebberywhere else? An if one of dem happened to hear
you speak such words, dis ole woman take a ride up to de Islan' in de
Black Maria, and you go to de debbil, sure! Know all about 'em,
honey--been dare afore!"
"Humph!" said the lawyer, nevertheless using lower voice even for the
disclaimer. "No danger, Aunty, I guess! There are no policemen
now-a-days--only Provost-Marshal Kennedy's spies, looking for traitors.
But what do you mean?--that I should get a doctor to--to--put him out of
the way?"
"Dats jes it, honey!" said the old woman, again rubbing her hands. "He
is in de way--put him out and have de ole man's money."
"Impossible!" spoke Egbert Crawford, in a tone which would have told a
close observer--and probably told the old woman--that he only meant: "I
do not see how to do it."
"Give um somefin," graphically said the crone.
"What!" spoke the lawyer, almost in as loud a tone as he had before
used, and rising from his chair in apparent indignation.
"Sit down, honey," said the old woman, with the same sneer in her voice
that had before been apparent. "Oh, I know you is a good man and
wouldn't do nuffin to hurt Cousin Dickey. Didn't kill his dog, nor
nuffin, did you, honey, a good wile ago, jes because you didn't like
_him_. Don't do nuffin now, if you don't want to! Let him have de girl,
an de ole man's money, an--"
"Woman!" said Egbert Crawford, rising altogether this time, and pacing
the floor like a man a good deal unquieted. "I hate Dick Crawford, and
you know it. I want Uncle John's money and I want Mary, and he is in my
way in both cases. You may as well know the whole truth--I hate him
enough to 'put him out of the way,' as we have both called it, but the
thing is impossible. Any doctor to whom I should speak would have me
arrested at once, for though they poison they do not wish to be
suspected of such operations; and there is no other way. He will get
well and go up to West Falls, and then all is over!" and the lawyer sunk
his head on his breast as if he had been the most ill-used of
individuals.
"Not while your ole Aunty libs, Marser Egbert, if you dar do what she
tells you!"
The words struck some chord previously active in the brain of Crawford.
He glanced up at the string of articles on the line of twine, then
stopped short in his walk, before the old woman.
"Well?"
"Oh, you see dem tings, and you is coming to it, is you, honey!"
chuckled the crone. "You 'member what Aunt Synchy is, now?"
"Yes, I remember," said Crawford, "though I forget the name. You are an
O--Ogee--Odee--no, O--"
"_An Obi woman!_" said the crone, rising and stretching herself to her
full height, with a look that was commanding in spite of her squalor.
"You 'member somefin, but not much. We be great people in Jamaica. Up in
de hills 'bove Spanish Town, we are de kings and de queens. De great Obi
spirit come down to us, when de moon am at its last quarter, an he tell
us how to cure and how to kill. We mix de charm at midnight, wid de
great Obi 'pearin' to us all de time in de smoke dat rises from de
kettle, an de secret words all de time a mutterin'; and de charm works,
an kills or cures 'way off hunerds of miles, 'cordin' as we want um for
our friens or our enemies. Does you hear, honey?"
"I hear!" said Egbert Crawford, for the moment absorbed if not
fascinated by the developments of this real or affected superstition;
but not carried away, it may be believed, from the influence which this
hideous old woman might be able to exert on his own fortunes.
"Mammy--you don't 'member ole Mammy?"--the old woman went on. "Captain
Lewis brought Mammy an me from Jamaica more'n fifty years ago. She mus'
have died when you was a little picanninny. She was de great Obi woman,
de queen of dem all; and she tole me afore she died, so's I could do
mos' as much. Many's de lub potion Mammy an me has mixed up, dat has
made some ob de wite bosoms fuller afore dey was done workin; and many's
de charm--"
"Poh! nonsense! don't say 'charm'; call it 'dose'!" broke in the lawyer,
at last impatient. "I believe you can kill, whether you can cure or not,
Aunt Synchy; but I am a man, with some experience in the world, and I
don't believe in your Obi. All your dead cats and babies' hands and
snakes yonder, are just so many tricks to influence the superstitious.
_I_ know better, and they don't influence _me_!"
"Oh, dey doesn't, eh, honey? You is too smart an don't believe in de
Obi?" For the moment her face was lowering and threatening--then it
changed again to the same wrinkled Sphynx as before. "Nebber mind--you
is my boy, an I lubs you, an so you 'sult de ole woman widout de Obi
payin' you for it! Call it 'dose,' then, honey--many's de dose dat dese
hans have mixed, dat has made de coffin-maker hab somefin to do and sent
de property where it belonged."
"I believe you!" was the laconic comment of Egbert Crawford, when the
crone, spite of his interruptions, had finished her long rigmarole. What
followed may quite as well be imagined as described. Richard Crawford
was doomed to be operated upon by one of those insidious and deadly
vegetable poisons, outwardly applied, in which none have such horrible
skill as the crones of the African race who have derived their knowledge
from the West India Islands. Whether it should be brought near the head
by concealment in a pillow, or near the more vital portions of the body
itself through use of a bandage worn near the skin,--the effect would be
the same--insensible debilitation, decline, death! But the latter plan
would be much the more rapid; and in neither event, when the deed was
done, would there be one mark, perceptible even to the dissecting
surgeon, telling that other than natural decay had brought about
dissolution.
Ten minutes afterwards, Aunt Synchy was busy compounding a _black
paste_, from various preparations which she found among the vials on the
shelf and under one corner of the heap of rags which she called her
bed--crooning all the while a dismal attempt at a tune which made even
the not-over-sensitive lawyer shudder, and putting the mixture at last
into his hands with a "Lor' bress you, honey!" which might have made
_any one_ shudder if he had understood the connection. Fifteen minutes
later, the Tombs lawyer left Thomas Street, without the information of
which he had originally come in search, but his mind now full of other
things, and bearing in his mind the mental label of the prescription:
"to be used as directed."
So vice buds into crime whenever opportunity offers, and the Hazaels of
the world, who have believed that they never could be brought to "do
this thing," pursue it with an energy and determination shaming the
efforts of older offenders. Yesterday only an illicit lover: to-day the
destroyer of children unborn! Yesterday only an _ordinary_ scoundrel:
to-day the worst and most deadly of all murderers--the _poisoner_!
Three months later--to wit, toward the close of June--that state of
affairs was existing at the house of Richard Crawford, which has before
been indicated. What was it, indeed, that Josephine Harris had dimly
discovered?