If either of us wanted to do or get
something, and we handed over the bundle to one of the house
children to hold, there was a stampede of men and women off the
verandah, out of the yard, and over the fence, if need be, that was
exceedingly comic, but most convincing as to the reality of the
terror and horror in which they held the thing. Even its own mother
could not be trusted with the child; she would have killed it. She
never betrayed the slightest desire to have it with her, and after a
few days' nursing and feeding up she was anxious to go back to her
mistress, who, being an enlightened woman, was willing to have her
if she came without the child.
The main horror is undoubtedly of the child, the mother being killed
more as a punishment for having been so intimately mixed up in
bringing the curse, danger, and horror into the village than for
anything else.
The woman went back by the road that had been cut for her coming,
and would have to live for the rest of her life an outcast, and for
a long time in a state of isolation, in a hut of her own into which
no one would enter, neither would any one eat or drink with her, nor
partake of the food or water she had cooked or fetched.
