“I do trust, sir,” responded the ancient, “that such a kind-hearted gent may never meet with it.  Ah, I do trust that you never may, which is to say, so to speak, as I do trust as you’ll never meet that black doctor.  If ever a man, had the evil eye, that black doctor’s got it, and old Mother Shale what lives in the cottage on the heath down against the windmill, she warned me, she did, three days after he come here.  ‘Mr. Corder,’ she says, ‘that black doctor has the evil eye!’ And never was a truer word spoke.  He’s been the bane and blight of this ’ere place, he has.”

He paused from sheer lack of breath, and having allowed him some little interval of repose: 

“But what has the evil eye to do with the laying of man-traps and the shooting of visitors who may chance to cross the estate?” I inquired.

“Ah, that’s it!  But the evil eye, I’m told, goes with the evil heart, and that man’s heart’s as black as his face.  Blacker,” he added, on second thoughts.

“Yet you have no positive evidence that Dr. Greefe is responsible for the setting of these man-traps and the attitude of Hawkins?”

“Nobody has,” declared my acquaintance earnestly.  “If anybody had, we’d have had the law on him long ago.”

“And is Lady Burnham often seen about?” I inquired.

“Never!” was the reply.  “She ain’t passed the gates of the Park this twelve months and more.”

He looked about him covertly, and: 

“It’s my belief,” he affirmed, lowering his quavering voice almost to a whisper, “that she’ll never pass them gates again alive.”

“Oh,” said I.  “This seems to be a very cheerful neighborhood.  Yet in spite of your wishes on my behalf, I must confess I should like a glimpse of this black doctor.  Does he practice about here?”

“Practice?  Is it likely?”

“Then he has private means?”

“His house belongs to the estate,” was the reply; “and you can’t tell me he ever pays any rent.  As to his means I don’t know nothing about that.”

I gathered little more of interest from my acquaintance of “The Threshers,” but indeed I had gathered enough, and as I wended my way back to the Abbey Inn, I was turning over in my mind the extraordinary story that he had related to me concerning Dr. Damar Greefe.

Clearly the man lived the life of a pariah and I knew not whether to pity him or otherwise.  In an ignorant community it is a dreadful thing to earn such a reputation as that which evidently attached to the Eurasian doctor; and this talk of the evil eye took me back automatically to the early days of this quaint spot, where, cut off from the larger things of life, the simple folk continued to hold the same beliefs which had stirred their forefathers.  In those remote times when the white brethren from the neighboring Abbey had held absolute sway in that country-side, the life history of one accused, as Dr. Damar Greefe was now accused, of possessing the evil eye, would very probably have terminated upon a pile of faggots, by order of Mother Church.  It was all very strange, and apart from its importance in the eyes of the ignorant country folk, seemed to contain a nucleus of something more germane to the object of my mission than the imaginings of ancient sorcery which still lingered in the minds of the people of Upper Crossleys.