But the song was not from the throat of Bras-Coupe’s “piti zozo.”  Silent and severe by day, she moaned away whole nights heaping reproaches upon herself for the impulse—­now to her, because it had failed, inexplicable in its folly—­which had permitted her hand to lie in Bras-Coupe’s and the priest to bind them together.

For in the audacity of her pride, or, as Agricola would have said, in the immensity of her impudence, she had held herself consecrate to a hopeless love.  But now she was a black man’s wife! and even he unable to sit at her feet and learn the lesson she had hoped to teach him.  She had heard of San Domingo; for months the fierce heart within her silent bosom had been leaping and shouting and seeing visions of fire and blood, and when she brooded over the nearness of Agricola and the remoteness of Honore these visions got from her a sort of mad consent.  The lesson she would have taught the giant was Insurrection.  But it was too late.  Letting her dagger sleep in her bosom, and with an undefined belief in imaginary resources, she had consented to join hands with her giant hero before the priest; and when the wedding had come and gone like a white sail, she was seized with a lasting, fierce despair.  A wild aggressiveness that had formerly characterized her glance in moments of anger—­moments which had grown more and more infrequent under the softening influence of her Mademoiselle’s nature—­now came back intensified, and blazed in her eye perpetually.  Whatever her secret love may have been in kind, its sinking beyond hope below the horizon had left her fifty times the mutineer she had been before—­the mutineer who has nothing to lose.

“She loves her candio” said the negroes.

“Simple creatures!” said the overseer, who prided himself on his discernment, “she loves nothing; she hates Agricola; it’s a case of hate at first sight—­the strongest kind.”

Both were partly right; her feelings were wonderfully knit to the African; and she now dedicated herself to Agricola’s ruin.

The senor, it has been said, endeavored to be happy; but now his heart conceived and brought forth its first-born fear, sired by superstition—­the fear that he was bewitched.  The negroes said that Bras-Coupe had cursed the land.  Morning after morning the master looked out with apprehension toward the fields, until one night the worm came upon the indigo, and between sunset and sunrise every green leaf had been eaten up and there was nothing left for either insect or apprehension to feed upon.

And then he said—­and the echo came back from the Cannes Brulees—­that the very bottom culpability of this thing rested on the Grandissimes, and specifically on their fugleman Agricola, through his putting the hellish African upon him.  Moreover, fever and death, to a degree unknown before, fell upon his slaves.  Those to whom life was spared—­but to whom strength did not return—­wandered about the place like scarecrows, looking for shelter, and made the very air dismal with the reiteration, “No’ ouanga (we are bewitched), Bras-Coupe fe moi des grigis (the voudou’s spells are on me).”  The ripple of song was hushed and the flowers fell upon the floor.