“There is no need to be, my dear fellow, I can verify everything I say, and I fear no man’s resentment. I was stationed in Jamaica with my regiment, some fifteen years ago, when this girl was a child of six years old, running half naked about her father’s plantation, uncared for by either parent, and associating solely with the negro servants. Brandt was a brute--the perpetrator of such atrocities in vivisection and other scientific experiments, that he was finally slaughtered on his own plantation by his servants, and everyone said it served him right. The mother was the most awful woman I have ever seen, and my experience of the sex in back slums and alleys has not been small. She was the daughter of a certain Judge Carey of Barbadoes by one of his slave girls, and Brandt took her as his mistress before she was fourteen. At thirty, when I saw her, she was a revolting spectacle. Gluttonous and obese--her large eyes rolling and her sensual lips protruding as if she were always licking them in anticipation of her prey. She was said to be ‘Obeah’ too by the natives and they ascribed all the deaths and diseases that took place on the plantation, to her malign influence. Consequently, when they got her in their clutches, I have heard that they did not spare her, but killed her in the most torturing fashion they could devise.” “And did the British Government take no notice of the massacre?” “There was an enquiry, of course, but the actual perpetrator of the murders could not be traced, and so the matter died out. The hatred and suspicion in which Brandt had been held for some time, had a great effect upon the verdict, for in addition to his terrible experiments upon animals--experiments which he performed simply for his own gratification and for no use that he made of them in treating his fellow creatures--he had been known to decoy diseased and old natives into his laboratory, after which they were never seen again, and it was the digging up of human bones on the plantation, which finally roused the negroes to such a pitch of indignation that they rose _en masse_, and after murdering both Brandt and his abominable mistress, they set fire to the house and burned it to the ground. There is no doubt but that, if the overseer of the plantation, an African negro named Pete, had not carried off the little girl, she would have shared the fate of her parents. And who can say if it would not have been as well if she had!” “I really cannot see what right you have to give vent to such a sentiment!” exclaimed Captain Pullen. “What has this terrible story got to do with Miss Brandt?” “Everything! ‘When the cat is black, the kitten is black too!’ It’s the law of Nature!” “I don’t believe it! Miss Brandt bears no trace in feature or character of the parentage you ascribe to her!”