He took a glass of the water that Viny had brought, held up old Caroline’s head, and washed down two big capsules into the already poisoned stomach of the old negress.  His simple face was quite inscrutable as he did this.  He left other capsules for Nan to administer at regular intervals.  Then he and Captain Renfrew motored out of Niggertown, out of its dust and filth and stench.

At four o’clock in the morning Caroline Siner died.

CHAPTER VI

When Nan Berry saw that Caroline was dead, the black woman dropped a glass of water and a capsule of calomel and stared.  A queer terror seized her.  She began such a wailing that it aroused others in Niggertown.  At the sound they got out of their beds and came to the Siner cabin, their eyes big with mystery and fear.  At the sight of old Caroline’s motionless body they lifted their voices through the night.

The lamentation carried far beyond the confines of Niggertown.  The last gamblers in the cedar glade heard it, and it broke up their gaming and drinking.  White persons living near the black crescent were waked out of their sleep and listened to the eerie sound.  It rose and fell in the darkness like a melancholy organ chord.  The wailing of the women quivered against the heavy grief of the men.  The half-asleep listeners were moved by its weirdness to vague and sinister fancies.  The dolor veered away from what the Anglo-Saxon knows as grief and was shot through with the uncanny and the terrible.  White children crawled out of their small beds and groped their way to their parents.  The women shivered and asked of the darkness, “What makes the negroes howl so?”

Nobody knew,—­least of all, the negroes.  Nobody suspected that the bedlam harked back to the jungle, to black folk in African kraals beating tom-toms and howling, not in grief, but in an ecstasy of terror lest the souls of their dead might come back in the form of tigers or pythons or devils and work woe to the tribe.  Through the night the negroes wailed on, performing through custom an ancient rite of which they knew nothing.  They supposed themselves heartbroken over the death of Caroline Siner.

Amid this din Peter Siner sat in his room, stunned by the sudden taking off of his mother.  The reproaches that she had expressed to old Captain Renfrew clung in Peter’s brain.  The brown man had never before realized the faint amusement and condescension that had flavored all his relations with his mother since his return home.  But he knew now that she had felt his disapproval of her lifelong habits; that she saw he never explained or attempted to explain his thoughts to her, assuming her to be too ignorant; as she put it, “a fool.”

The pathos of his mother’s last days, what she had expected, what she had received, came to Peter with the bitterness of what is finished and irrevocable.  She had been dead only a few minutes, yet she could never know his grief and remorse; she could never forgive him.  She was utterly removed in a few minutes, in a moment in the failing of a breath.  The finality of death overpowered him.