The White Witch of Rosehall

by Herbert G. De Lisser

  The waiting, angry crowd heard and were impressed. An influence superior to their own surly, snarling temper dominated them. There were women there who, the night before, had swayed and writhed their bodies to the compulsion of a weird, heathen rhythm; now some of them sank upon their knees and sobbed softly, murmuring the name of Jesus. And men stood with bowed heads and respectful demeanour, who last night had looked with bloodshot eyes at the slaughter and sacrifice of an animal to some but half-apprehended evil deity. It was a strange spectacle, for all that crowd was silently praying in unison with the voice inside the room, and overhead the stars came out and pricked with light the enveloping darkness, and the wind sighed through the trees. Then the voice ceased, and after a couple of minutes Rider issued forth, a strange, sad look upon his face, and beckoned to Robert.

  The young man stepped into the room, where only one woman stood beside the bed on which lay Millicent. He went quietly to the bedside and touched her hand lightly; she looked up at him and smiled.

  ‘I know you would come,’ she said faintly.

  He found no words to reply, could not trust himself to speak.

  ‘Take care of yourself,’ she whispered again; ‘take care, Squire. You promise?’

  He bowed his head and patted her arm, and there was silence for a little while.

  When at length he bent over she appeared to be sleeping; her strength had given out. He turned and tiptoed out of the room.

  There was nothing more to do, nothing to stay for. The doctor was anxious to be gone. Robert knew that for the last time he had seen Millicent’s face, had taken final farewell of a victim of strange and atrocious superstitions. He mounted his horse and, with his two companions, turned to go.

  Takoo came up to him. ‘I will never fo’get all this, Squire,’ he said, ‘whatever happen.’

  Without a word the white men rode off, and in Montego Bay the doctor left them, regretting that he had been of no slightest use. He parted respectfully from Rider, too, who, on the way to Takoo’s place, he had hardly noticed, knowing much about him as a man who had fallen below the esteem of all his class. The two friends went on, their destination Rosehall; tomorrow Robert would inform Ashman that, no matter what the consequences, he would not be back at his work on Wednesday. He briefly told Rider of his resolve and Rider said that he too would endeavour to leave, especially since it was only too probable that on that day the slaves would remain idle, and it might even be that the white people on the estates would be forced to flee into Montego Bay. ‘The rumours are coming thick and fast now,’ he added, but did not interest his companion.

  Early on the following morning news came by special bearer to Psyche. Millicent had died in her sleep during the night.

  Chapter Twenty-Two—IN THE DARK OF THE NIGHT

  ‘SO you want to leave Rosehall?’ said Mr. Ashman; ‘When do you plan to go?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ returned Robert.

  ‘Very well; you can go. You haven’t been of very much use here at best. I will send you what wages are due to you a little later.’

  ‘The wages you can keep; your impertinent remarks you had better keep to yourself also, or you will be sorry for them.’

  ‘Hell! Sorry, I?’ Ashman exploded. ‘But I am not going to quarrel with you, young man; you’re not worth it. Well, sir, what are you waiting for?’ This to Rider.

  ‘I should like to leave, too, Mr. Ashman, tomorrow morning.’

  ‘You have not my permission, Mr. Rider. This estate will be short-handed and you must remain for a little while yet. But you can go at the end of the week, if you like,’ he added contemptuously. ‘I suppose you want to follow your friend.’

  ‘That has nothing to do with the matter,’ said Rider with some dignity. ‘You must know by this, that the slaves are not likely to come out to work tomorrow, so there will be no use for me here.’

  ‘If you were a man, there would be. We may want four or five white men here to keep the people in order in case they begin to attempt any foolishness, but I suppose you wouldn’t be any use for that. But you can’t leave in the morning unless you want to be prosecuted. I’ll tell you what, though,’ he said, as a thought seemed to strike him. I’ll let you go during the day sometime, if nothing happens here. Rutherford can leave as early as he wants to, and the sooner the better. I want his room fixed up. Next time I take good care that we don’t employ fal-de-la young men and deserters on this estate.’

  The two men walked away without answering, and Ashman looked after them with a scowl. So Mr. Rutherford would be leaving early the next morning, before daybreak probably, to have a cool ride into Montego Bay. He was done with the estate. He wished to be soon in the town to begin his criminal prosecution, or accusation, or whatever he might choose to call it: he would waste no time. But perhaps he would never reach Montego Bay.

  No; it would never have done to let Rider go along with him, though the sooner Mr. Rider was off the premises the better. He had kept too sober. He too might be inclined to make trouble.

  The day wore on. Psyche had received permission from Burbridge to go to her cousin’s funeral, which was to be that afternoon, and she had set off betimes to trudge the twelve miles of distance she had to cover. Burbridge joined his friends at lunch-time, but no one had much of a lunch. Burbridge had been informed by a bookkeeper on the neighbouring estate that there would be difficulty with the people next day. He had cleaned and oiled his gun. He knew that Ashman and the two Scotsmen would also be prepared. Rider and Rutherford were leaving.

  But four white men, who could depend upon two or three black headmen (who would also be armed) should be enough to put down any ordinary demonstration. If anything more serious threatened, the white people would be compelled to withdraw to the town and leave matters to the militia.

  They had little to say to one another today. Burbridge knew better than to dwell on the death of the girl, Rider avoided the topic with a natural sensitiveness, Robert did not mention it. What now filled his mind, occupied his thoughts to the exclusion of almost anything else, was the duty before him, the duty of bringing to justice the most dangerous woman in all the West Indies, a woman who might be insane but who in any age and country would be accounted a criminal. He tried to think of the matter impersonally. He spoke to himself about justice, not vengeance. But the memory of a wan face and faint voice, a voice whose last words were an appeal to him to take care of himself, was uppermost in his mind. He was thinking less of pure justice than he desired to believe.

  The night came dark and squally, though there was no rain; and by seven the darkness was dense. He could not sleep, he was restless, the minutes seemed long, and it would be hours before morning came. Rider, he had noticed vaguely, was very restless, too; he attributed this to the emotional disturbances they had both experienced yesterday, and to the approaching end of their connection with this accursed place. He was right as to his belief that Rider had passed through what was, for him, an exhausting spiritual phase of emotion; his whole past had, as it were, come back to him, with his sudden assumption of sacerdotal office and authority; he had been profoundly shaken; his whole being had been disturbed. And now, suddenly, as it usually did, the craving for drink had come upon him, his body felt dry, burnt out; there was a feverish thirst in every fibre of it. Yet he resisted it as he had not done for years. In spite of the craving he had not touched a drop of rum that day. But it shook and tortured him, and he hoped and prayed that his resolution would last until he could be back in the town and preparing for his departure from the country. Rider felt that if he left Rosehall and had something to occupy his mind amid different surroundings, with a new future beckoning to him, he might be able successfully to withstand the terrible temptation.

  At about ten o’clock he came to Robert, coming on foot, and found the young man seated on the veranda. Burbridge was in his own room.

  ‘I walked over; I couldn’t sleep,’ he explained ‘I thought you wouldn’t be sleeping either.’
r />   ‘I can’t.’

  ‘No. And I marked the drums particularly tonight. There are more of them than I have ever heard before, and they are not all for dancing. I imagine. Do you notice how they seem to come from every quarter?’

  He paused, while the air seemed to throb with the sound of the drumming, some of it very faint and far away, travelling for miles through the atmosphere, which at that moment was still.

  Mechanically Robert listened to the staccato beats, the low rumblings, that sounded through the surrounding darkness.

  ‘Some are drums of the dance, and some of religious ceremonies, perhaps; but some, I fancy, are war drums,’ said Rider. ‘There are big palavers tonight.’

  ‘Shall we take a walk?’ suggested Robert. ‘We both don’t want to sleep. Let us wander about a bit.’

  This suggestion fitted in with Rider’s restless mood as well as with Robert’s. The latter clapped on his hat and they started out.

  They had no particular objective, and unless they wished to entangle themselves in the cane-fields they must either go north towards the main road and the sea, or south towards the hills. The path southward was that which led to the Great House, which was in darkness, a thicker black in the midst of the blackness of the night. They could not be seen if they came near to it and skirted it; so they turned their steps in that direction.

  Robert felt impelled by a necessity for audible self-criticism. ‘I have made a nice hash of my life in Jamaica, Rider,’ he said, as they went on.

  ‘Most of us do,’ replied the other man grimly: ‘I think I have said that before. But you appear to have done so much less than most others. You have caught yourself up in time.’

  ‘Circumstances have stopped me. I did not know myself. I had all sorts of high hopes and resolutions. I was going to learn a lot while enjoying myself; I was going to have a fine time and yet become a competent planter. I was going to make my old man proud of me; show my strength and determination, and all that. But I hadn’t been here a day before I was making love to a woman I knew nothing about, and I hadn’t been here a week before I was philandering with one of the native girls, and drinking lots of Jamaica rum, and neglecting my work, and beginning to ruin my constitution. And now one woman hates me like poison and threatens me, and the other is dead, through me. A lovely record in less than a month!’

  Rider made no comment.

  ‘I suppose,’ continued Robert bitterly, ‘I am only a rash, impulsive fool, after all, not the paragon I imagined myself to be.’

  ‘You are not more rash or impulsive than most other people, I fancy,’ said Rider soothingly. ‘Nine out of every ten young men from the Old Country fall by the way in Jamaica if they begin low down. That was your mistake, and yet the idea behind it was excellent. Well, there is nothing to be gained now by dwelling on mistakes; you had better let the dead past bury its dead. You are a young man and your future is still in the making.’

  ‘It will certainly have to be much different from the present.’

  ‘In a way,’ said Rider, wishing to stop Robert from too much self-accusation, ‘you have even been more unfortunate than the majority of men who have come out to Jamaica. You fell in immediately with a sort of Lucrezia Borgia. Annie Palmer has lived out of her time; she should have been born in the fourteenth or fifteenth century; with her will and ability she, woman though she is, might have made a great name for herself, and her iniquities might have counted as venial offences even if husband-killing were included among them. But here she was, and you met her, and she fascinated and encouraged you, made open love to you. I wonder how many young men could have resisted that temptation. I can’t think of one.’

  ‘And even now,’ said Robert suddenly, ‘I feel sorry for her. Terribly sorry. I have made up my mind what to do, for she is dangerous and will always be so. But it is not pleasant to think that I, who loved her—and she has said she loves me, too—should be the one to accuse her. The more I think of it, the more the thought harasses me. I have felt more than once today as if I were about to be a betrayer: a man who has eaten a woman’s bread and salt and then goes about to hand her over to—it may be death.’

  ‘I had a feeling that you would be thinking something of the sort,’ said Rider, a trifle dryly. ‘Don’t you think you might take a week or so to consider calmly your steps? Nothing is to be lost by that.’

  Robert shook his head resolutely. ‘The blood of a murdered woman cries out of the ground for justice,’ he said.

  ‘The quotation is not quite correct, but I might cap it with another: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay.”‘

  ‘Would you have me let her go free, to do what she wills with other people?’ cried Robert.

  ‘I would have you do nothing you do not wish to do, my friend. You yourself are having your doubts now as to the best course to follow, and I should be sorry if you did anything now, however right it might seem, or be, with which you should reproach yourself later on. I cannot advise you, but you yourself have said that you both have been lovers.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Robert, as though he were thinking aloud, ‘if she is quite sane?’

  ‘Pride, and the life she has led, and the power she has had over her slaves, may have unhinged her brain,’ Rider commented; ‘that is quite possible. Inordinate vanity and fierce passions, in surroundings like these, may have unbalanced her, or insanity may be her heritage. Or traffic with evil things in Haiti may have affected her brain. We cannot know. Perhaps it is only charitable to think so.’

  ‘But what a splendid asylum for a mad woman?’ exclaimed Robert, looking up, for they had come within less than a stone’s throw of Annie Palmer’s home.

  It was all in darkness. Its façade towered above them as they halted on the upward slope to gaze upon it; it stood out dark against the pitchy background of the night, with all its blatant assertion of opulence and power. It had been built to set forth the riches and pride of its first possessor; money had been lavished upon it, not merely for comfort, but by way of emphasis. Even to a headstrong and proud plantocracy it was intended as a sort of challenge from one of its members who wished to be considered as the first among his peers. And now it housed one woman only, and she shunned by her class and shunning them, more self-assertive than had been any of her predecessors, and one who had carried her love for power and domination to lengths of which they had never dared to dream.

  Instinctively they walked soft-footed. They had no wish to draw attention to themselves, though as the mistress must have been sleeping then, and the servants had probably retired, there was no danger of their being seen or heard. The wind, too, was blowing fitfully, and the night was black. Heavy clouds drifted across the sky. Ordinary sounds would not penetrate into the Great House at that hour, nor could casual eyes observe them.

  They turned quietly to their right, following a path which would lead them to the rear of the property, towards which they planned to walk until they were tired. Pursuing this course they would pass the servants’ quarters and the kitchen at the left wing of the house. They had ceased to talk; in a minute or two they found themselves on a gentle slope which they proposed to climb, and on their left hand, some seven feet above the level of the ground on which they stood, rose the paved platform (up to which some steps led) which formed part of the back veranda of the main building.

  Here too everything was in darkness.

  But it seemed to them both that the darkness was moving, or rather that something moved in it. It was not curiosity alone that caused them to halt as though one man, and peer fixedly through the gloom towards that raised stone platform. There was some suggestion there of presences, something like whispers floated on the air; as their eyes became more accustomed to the scene at which they stared they perceived without any doubt that figures were outlined dimly there, human figures, and even while they stood with muscles tensed and all sorts of surmises in their minds the shadowy figures seemed to dissolve or fade away and then they vanished entir
ely.

  Robert clutched Rider by the arm. ‘What on earth can that mean?’ he whispered, having in mind the malign apparition he had seen on Christmas Night in the woods that led to Palmyra.

  ‘They look like human beings, and they have gone into the Great House,’ whispered Rider in reply. ‘My God what can that mean?’

  A scream, sharp, piercing, agonised, stabbed through the sombre air, then ceased abruptly as though smothered, A light broke out in the room which Robert knew to be Annie’s, a light shining dimly through the glass panes of the closed windows.

  ‘It is her voice,’ exclaimed Robert, ‘and, and——’

  ‘Come!’ commanded Rider. ‘Those men were slaves. I understand now.’

  They leapt up the steps that led to the platform; then, Robert now leading the way, ran to the little sloping structure which he had noticed on the night when Annie had shown him over the house. The opening which that contrivance covered formed the back ingress to the cellars of the house: a short flight of brick steps, a vaulted passage, brought you into the cellars, which were paved with rubble. But Robert knew also that, to the left, was a little door, usually locked, which led by a sort of ladder, or narrow wooden steps, to the hall above in which began the grand stairway which was the pride of Rosehall. Anyone who negotiated that cellar door would be able to gain the topmost story without any difficulty whatever.

  He led Rider, for he knew the way. Down the outer steps, then through the low vaulted passage they went as rapidly as the thick blackness would allow; they reached the small door in the cellar—it was open! Evidently the key had been purloined from Annie, in whose possession it usually was. In a few seconds the friends reached the hall above, were leaping up the stairway, had gained the upper story. There they found that they had hurled themselves into the midst of a number of men who, surprised at their sudden and unexpected appearance, and frightened desperately by it, made no effort to hold them back as they rushed through an open door into Annie’s room.