Part 2

‘Well,’ Edward went on, lowering his tone to more persuasive accents, ‘be advised by me, then, and if you want to get what you ask from Queen Victoria, do as I tell you. Disperse to-night quietly and separately. Don’t go off in a body together and talk with one another excitedly around your watch-fires about your wrongs and your grievances. Burn no more factories and cane-houses. Attack no more helpless men and innocent women. Think no more of your rights for the present. But go each man to his own hut, and wait to see what Queen Victoria will do for you.—If you continue foolishly to burn and riot, shall I tell you in plain words what will happen to you? The governor will be obliged to bring out the soldiers and the volunteers against you; they will call upon you, as I call upon you now, in the Queen’s name, to lay down your pistols and your guns and your cutlasses; and if you don’t lay them down at once, they will fire upon you, and disperse you easily. Don’t be deceived. Don’t believe that because you are more numerous—because there are so many more of you than of the white men—you could conquer them and kill them by main force, if it ever came to open fighting. The soldiers, with their regular drill and their good arms and their constant training, could shoot you all down with the greatest ease, in spite of your numbers and your pistols and your cutlasses. I don’t say this to frighten you or to threaten you; I say it as your friend, because I don’t want you foolishly to expose yourselves to such a terrible butchery and slaughter.’

A murmur went through the crowd once more, and they looked dubiously and inquiringly toward Louis Delgado. But the African gave no sign and made no answer; he merely stood sullenly still by the post against which he was leaning; so Edward hastened to reassure the undecided mob of listening negroes by turning quickly to the other side of the moot question.

‘Now, listen again,’ he said, ‘for what I’m going to say to you now is very important. If you will disperse, and go each to his own home, without any further trouble or riot, I will undertake, myself, to go to England on purpose for you, and tell Queen Victoria herself about all your troubles. I will tell her that you haven’t always been justly treated, and I’ll try to get new and better laws made in future for you, under which you may secure more justice than you sometimes get under present arrangements. Do you understand me? If you go home at once, I promise to go across the sea and speak to Queen Victoria herself on your behalf, over in England.’

The view of British constitutional procedure implied in Edward Hawthorn’s words was not perhaps strictly accurate; but his negro hearers would hardly have felt so much impressed if he had offered to lay their grievances boldly at the foot of that impersonal entity, the Colonial Office; while the idea that they were to have a direct spokesman, partly of their own blood, with the Queen herself, flattered their simple African susceptibilities and helped to cool their savage anger. Like children as they are, they began to smile and show their great white teeth in infantile satisfaction, as pleasantly as though they had never dreamt ten minutes earlier of hacking Harry Noel’s body fiercely into little pieces; and more than one voice cried out in hearty tones: ‘Hoorrah for Mr Hawtorn! Him de black man fren’. Gib him a cheer, boys! Him gwine to ’peak for us to Queen Victoria!’

‘Then promise me faithfully,’ Edward said, holding out his hand once more before him, ‘that you’ll all go home this very minute and settle down quietly in your own houses.’

‘We promise, sah,’ a dozen voices answered eagerly.

Edward Hawthorn turned anxiously for a moment to Louis Delgado. ‘My brother,’ he said to him rapidly in Arabic, ‘this is your doing. You must help me now to quiet the people you have first so fiercely and so foolishly excited. Assist me in dispersing them, and I will try to lighten for you the punishment which will surely be inflicted upon you as ringleader, when this is all over.’

But Delgado, propped in a stony attitude against the great wooden post of the piazza, answered still never a word. He stood there to all appearance in stolid and sullen indifference to all that was passing so vividly around him, with his white and bloodshot eyes staring vacantly into the blank darkness that stretched in front of him, behind the flickering light of the now collapsed and burnt-out cane-houses.

Edward touched him lightly on his bare arm. To his utter horror and amazement, though not cold, it was soft and corpse-like, as in the first hour of death, before rigidity and chilliness have begun to set in. He looked up into the bloodshot eyes. Their staring balls seemed already glazed and vacuous, utterly vacant of the fierce flashing light that had gleamed from the pupils so awfully and savagely but ten minutes before, as he brandished his cutlass with frantic yells above Harry Noel’s fallen body. Two of the plantation negroes, attracted by Edward’s evident recoil of horror, came forward with curiosity, flinging down their cutlasses, and touched the soft cheeks, not with the reverent touch which a white man feels always due to the sacredness of death, but harshly and rudely, as one might any day touch a senseless piece of stone or timber.

Edward looked at them with a pallid face of mute inquiry. The youngest of the two negroes drew back for a second, overtaken apparently by a superstitious fear, and murmured low in an awe-struck voice: ‘Him dead, sah, dead—stone dead. Dead dis ten minute, since ever you begin to ’peak to de people, sah.’

He was indeed. His suppressed rage at the partial failure of his deeply cherished scheme of vengeance on the hated white men, coming so close upon his paroxysm of triumph over the senseless bodies of Mr Dupuy and Harry Noel, had brought about a sudden fit of cardiac apoplexy. The old African’s savage heart had burst outright with conflicting emotions. Leaning back upon the pillar for support, as he felt the blood failing within him, he had died suddenly and unobserved without a word or a cry, and had stood there still, as men will often stand under similar circumstances, propped up against the supporting pillar, in the exact attitude in which death had first overtaken him. In the very crisis of his victory and his defeat, he had been called away suddenly to answer for his conduct before a higher tribunal than the one with which Edward Hawthorn had so gently and forbearingly threatened him.

The effect of this sudden catastrophe upon the impressionable minds of the excited negroes was indeed immediate and overwhelming. Lifting up their voices in loud wails and keening, as at their midnight wakes, they cried tremulously one after another: ‘De Lard is against us—de Lard is against us! Ebbery man to your tents, O Israel! De Lard hab killed Delgado—hab killed Delgado—hab smitten him down, for de murder him committed!’ To their unquestioning antique faith, it was the visible judgment of heaven against their insurrection, the blood of Theodore Dupuy and Harry Noel crying out for vengeance from the floor of the piazza, like the blood of righteous Abel long before, crying out for vengeance from the soil of Eden.

More than one of them believed in his heart, too, that the mysterious words in the unknown language which Edward Hawthorn had muttered over the old African were the spell that had brought down upon him before their very eyes the unseen bolt of the invisible powers. Whether it were obeah, or whether it were imprecation and solemn prayer to the God of heaven, they thought within themselves, in their dim, inarticulate, unspoken fashion, that ‘Mr Hawtorn word bring down de judgment dat very minute on Louis Delgado.’

In an incredibly short space of time, the great crowd of black faces had melted away as quickly as it came, and Edward Hawthorn was left alone in the piazza, with none but the terrified servants of the Orange Grove household to help him in his task or to listen to his orders. All that night long, across the dark gorge and the black mango grove, they could hear the terrified voices of the negroes in their huts singing hymns, and crying aloud in strange prayers to God in heaven that the guilt of this murder might not be visited upon their heads, as it had been visited before their very eyes that night on Louis Delgado. To the negro mind, the verdict of fate is the verdict of heaven.

‘Take up his body, too, and lay it down on the sofa,’ Edward said to Uncle ’Zekiel, still beside himself with terror at the manifold horrors of this tragical evening.

‘I doan’t can dare, sah,’ Uncle ’Zekiel answered tremulously—‘I doan’t can dare lay me hand upon de corpse, I tellin’ you, sah. De finger ob de Lard has smite Delgado. I doan’t dare to lift an’ carry him.’

‘One of you boys, then, come and help me,’ Edward cried, holding up the corpse with one hand to keep it from falling.

But not one of them dared move a single step nearer to the terrible awe-inspiring object.

At last, finding that no help was forthcoming on any hand, Edward lifted up the ghastly burden all by himself in his own arms, and laid it down reverently and gently on the piazza sofa. ‘It is better so,’ he murmured to himself slowly and pitifully. ‘There will be no more blood on either side shed at anyrate for this awful evening’s sorry business.’

And then at length he had leisure to turn back into the house itself and make inquiries after Mr Dupuy and Harry and Nora.

WILD-BEES AND BEE-HUNTING.

There are, it is said, no fewer than twenty-seven genera, and one hundred and seventy-seven species of bees, natives of Great Britain. But one only of all these, the _Apis millifica_, or common honey-bee, has been domesticated. Attempts have been made with others, especially with the _bombus_, or humble-bee, but without any adequate success.

The frequent mention of honey in the Old Testament from the patriarchal ages downward, and the description of Palestine as ‘a land flowing with milk and honey,’ may well have raised the question whether the honey was obtained from bees in a wild condition or in a state of domestication. The weight of evidence is in favour of the former. In the somewhat wandering life, as ‘strangers and pilgrims,’ which many of the patriarchs led, bee-culture would have been very inconvenient, if not impossible; and as honey was to be had in rich abundance simply for the seeking, there would be little inducement to undertake unnecessary cares and labours in the domestication of the native variety. There is no question, however, as to the possibility of inducing wild bees to accept domestication. In Cashmere and the north of India, the natives have a simple and ready method of doing this: in building their houses, they leave cavities in one of the walls having a sunny aspect, with a small hole like that of a modern hive opening outwards. The inner side of the wall is fitted with a frame of wood with a door attached. A swarm of bees in search of a new home—or perhaps the pioneers who are sent, a day or two before the actual swarming, to seek out a dwelling-place—would be attracted by such an ‘open door,’ and the family, or army, ten, twenty, or thirty thousand strong, would at once take possession. The vacant space would soon be filled by the busy workers; and the inmates of the house, having access to the store by means of the open door, could move a comb or two at pleasure, without distressing the bees, simply using the precaution of blowing in as much smoke at the back as would cause the bees to fly out at the front. English travellers report having seen the operation performed, and the bees quietly return when the work was done. The plan has been recommended for use in this country. It is at least practicable, if not necessary. In dwelling-houses there might be risks, which would not apply to farm-buildings and erections around a country house. But if man has not utilised this plan, the bees themselves have acted upon it. An instance of two within the writer’s own knowledge may not be uninteresting.

I was the tenant of Rose Cottage, Brenchley, Kent, from 1853 to 1862. The house—which has been considerably altered since—was well adapted for such a purpose. The upper parts of the walls were formed, as is common in that part of the county, externally of tiles on a framework of wood, and internally of lath and plaster. In the cavities there would be ample space for large stores of comb and honey. A swarm of bees took possession of a portion of the front wall, having a south-south-eastern aspect, entering their abode through a crevice between the tiles just over one of the chamber windows. They held possession for several years, and still held their own when I left the cottage. As they never swarmed, it is almost certain there must have been a large collection of honey; but for some reason or other, chiefly, no doubt, on account of the difficulty of taking the honey without injuring the house and exposing the whole family to the attacks of the bees, I profited in no way by their busy labours.

Less than ten years ago, when making a call at the old farmhouse, Penrhos, Lyonshall, Herefordshire, my attention was directed to a colony of bees which had made a settlement in the upper part of one of the walls of the house. I suggested the removal of a portion of the inner wall, and predicted a large ‘find.’ After some time, this advice was acted on; but the farmer adopted a plan which I should have strongly deprecated—the plan of destroying with brimstone the entire bee community. The store of honey was so great that every available keeler and pan in the house was filled to the extent of nearly two hundredweight.

Two other instances may be cited, as reported in the _West Surrey Times_. One is that of an extraordinary ‘take’ of honey from the walls of the _Hautboy and Fiddle Inn_, Ockham, Surrey. The outer walls of the house are about three feet in thickness, and at the very top of the third story a colony of bees had established themselves, holding undisturbed possession for a number of years. At length the innkeeper determined to find out their whereabouts. After a diligent search under the roof, a piece of comb was found. Descending to one of the upper bedrooms, chisel and hammer went to work, and a square of about two feet was opened in the front wall; here a large mass of comb was discovered; and after fumigating the bees, about one hundred and twenty pounds of honey were secured. Another and still more extraordinary ‘take’ of honey was secured at Winter’s Hall, Bramley, Surrey, the seat of Mr George Barrett. Some bees had long held possession of a space between the ceiling of the coachhouse and the granary: on effecting an entrance, about three hundredweight of honey was secured.

In some countries the honey-bee still roams at will and uncontrolled; this is notably the case in the western parts of the United States and Canada. The discovery of their natural hives for the purpose of securing the honey is the calling of a class of persons known as bee-hunters. A writer of considerable repute thus speaks on this subject: ‘The beautiful forests in which we were encamped abounded in bee-trees; that is to say, trees in the decayed trunks of which wild-bees had established their hives. It is surprising in what countless swarms the bees have overspread the Far West within but a moderate number of years. The Indians consider them the harbinger of the white man, as the buffalo is of the red man, and say that in proportion as the bee advances, the Indian and the buffalo retire. We are always accustomed to associate the hum of the beehive with the farmhouse and the flower-garden, and to consider those industrious little animals as connected with the busy haunts of men; and I am told that the wild-bee is seldom to be met with at any great distance from the frontier. They have been the heralds of civilisation, steadily preceding it, as it advanced from the Atlantic borders; and some of the ancient (early) settlers of the West pretend to give the very year when the honey-bee first crossed the Mississippi. The Indians, with surprise, found the mouldering trees of their forests suddenly teeming with ambrosial sweets; and nothing, I am told, can exceed the greedy relish with which they banquet for the first time upon the unbought luxury of the wilderness. At present, the honey-bee swarms in myriads in the noble groves and forests that skirt and intersect the prairies and extend along the alluvial bottoms of the rivers. It seems to me as if these beautiful regions answer literally to the description of the land of promise, “a land flowing with milk and honey;” for the rich pasturage of the prairies is calculated to sustain herds of cattle as countless as the sands upon the seashore; while the flowers with which they are enamelled render them a very paradise for the nectar-seeking bee.’

A bee-hunt must be a very exciting adventure, and, as most people would think, attended with considerable risk; but the ingenuity of the settlers, and especially of the bee-hunters, who make a living of the business, is equal to the occasion. Let us, for the sake of greater brevity, suppose a case, which is, however, little other than a narrative of simple facts. A party sets out in quest of a bee-tree—a tree in the cavity of which a colony of bees have established themselves. The party is headed by a veteran bee-hunter, a tall lank fellow, with his homespun dress hanging loosely about him, and a hat which might be taken for a beeskep. A man similarly attired attends him, with a long rifle on his shoulder. The rest of the party, six in number, are armed with axes and rifles. Thus accoutred, they are ready for any sport, or even more serious business. Reaching an open glade on the skirts of the forest, the party halts, and the leader advances to a low bush, on which he places a piece of honeycomb. This is a lure for the bees. In a very short time several are humming about it and diving into the cells. Laden with honey, they rise into the air and dart off in a straight line with almost the velocity of a bullet. The hunters watch attentively the course they take, and set off in the same direction, still watching the course of the bees. In this way the tree where the bees have made their home is reached. But it will often happen, as may be suspected, that the bees will elude the sight of the most vigilant hunter, and the party may wander about without succeeding in finding any treasure. Another method is then adopted: a few bees are caught and placed in a small box with a glass top, having at the bottom a small piece of honeycomb. When they have satisfied themselves with honey, two or three are allowed to escape, the hunters taking care to observe the direction of their flight and to follow them as rapidly as possible. When these bees are lost sight of, two or three others are set free and their course followed, and so on until the identical tree has been reached. It sometimes happens that one set of bees take an opposite course to their predecessors. The hunter knows by this that he has passed the tree, or otherwise missed his mark, and he retraces his steps and follows the lead of the unerring bees. The sight of the bee is so strong and keen that it can descry its home at an immense distance. It is a well-ascertained fact that if a bee be caught on a flower at any given distance south of its home, and then be taken in a close box an equal distance north of it, the little creature, when set free, after flying in a circle for a moment, will take a straight course to its identical tree. Therefore, the hunter who has intelligence, patience, and perseverance on his side is sure to be successful in the end.

It not unfrequently happens that when in the immediate neighbourhood of the tree, the hunter may not be able to distinguish the particular one he is searching for from the rest, as the entrance to the bee-castle is commonly many feet above the ground. He is not then at the end of his resources. A small fire is kindled, and upon a piece of stone or other suitable material made hot, some honeycomb is placed; the smell will at once induce the whole colony of bees to come down from their citadel, when the hunters proceed with their axes to bring down the tree. A vigorous writer thus describes the proceedings, when the party of hunters had traced the honey-laden bees to their hive in the hollow trunk of a blasted oak, into which, after buzzing about for a time, they entered at a hole about sixty feet from the ground: ‘Two of the bee-hunters now plied their axes vigorously at the foot of the tree, to level it with the ground. The mere spectators and amateurs in the meantime drew off to a cautious distance, to be out of the way of the falling of the tree and the vengeance of its inmates. The jarring blows of the axe seemed to have no effect in alarming or agitating this most industrious community; they continued to ply at their usual occupations; some arriving full-freighted into port, others sallying forth on new expeditions, like so many merchantmen in a money-making metropolis, little suspicious of impending bankruptcy and downfall. Even a loud crack, which announced the disrupture of the trunk, failed to divert their attention from the intense pursuit of gain. At length, down came the tree with a tremendous crash, bursting open from end to end, and displaying all the hoarded treasures of the commonwealth. One of the hunters immediately ran up with a wisp of lighted hay, as a defence against the bees. The latter, however, made no attack, and sought no revenge; they seemed stupefied by the catastrophe and unsuspicious of its cause, remaining crawling and buzzing about the ruins, without offering us any molestation.’

When the tree had been brought down, the whole party fell to with spoon and hunting-knife to scoop out the combs with which the hollow trunk was stored. A single tree has been known to yield from one hundredweight to one and a half hundredweight.