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"Aunt Synchy! Aunt Synchy!" said the lawyer, trying to recollect the past very rapidly, and catching some glimmers. "What? Aunt Synchy that used to live at " "Used to live at old Tom Crawford's. Lor bress you, yes!
The purposes of this narrative do not require the recording of all the conversation which took place between the Tombs lawyer and Aunt Synchy, when the latter had dusted off one of the miserable chairs and forced the former down into it, taking another herself, sitting square in front of him, and thrusting her face so close into his that the withered features seemed almost plastered against his own.
"You 'member what Aunt Synchy is, now?" "Yes, I remember," said Crawford, "though I forget the name. You are an O Ogee Odee no, O " "An Obi woman!" said the crone, rising and stretching herself to her full height, with a look that was commanding in spite of her squalor. "You 'member somefin, but not much. We be great people in Jamaica.
Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, when he said to Aunt Synchy, "What more could I do, I should like to know?" meant to be understood as asserting that nothing more was in his power; but there was really in his heart the wish for aid in some higher crime to effect his purposes; and the tempter came!
Instantly her withered face assumed a new expression of intelligence, and her hand shook so that she almost dropped the candle, as she cried: "Merciful Lord and Marser! If dat are ain't young Egbert Crawford!" "My name is certainly Egbert Crawford!" said that individual, very much surprised in his turn. "But who are you that know me?" "Don't know his ole Aunt Synchy!" exclaimed the old woman.
It is enough to say that that conversation corroborated the suspicion which the first words of the crone would have engendered that Aunt Synchy, in her younger days, had been a slave in the Crawford family, in a neighboring State where the institution had not yet been entirely abolished and that, at last manumitted by a mistaken kindness, she had finally wandered away to the crime and misery of negro life in the great city.
"I believe you can kill, whether you can cure or not, Aunt Synchy; but I am a man, with some experience in the world, and I don't believe in your Obi. All your dead cats and babies' hands and snakes yonder, are just so many tricks to influence the superstitious. I know better, and they don't influence me!" "Oh, dey doesn't, eh, honey? You is too smart an don't believe in de Obi?"
Ten minutes afterwards, Aunt Synchy was busy compounding a black paste, from various preparations which she found among the vials on the shelf and under one corner of the heap of rags which she called her bed crooning all the while a dismal attempt at a tune which made even the not-over-sensitive lawyer shudder, and putting the mixture at last into his hands with a "Lor' bress you, honey!" which might have made any one shudder if he had understood the connection.
In this conversation it became apparent, too, that Thomas Crawford, the father of Egbert, had been the quasi owner of Synchy, and that she retained for the son something of that singular attachment which appears to be inseparable from any description of feudality.
"Don't want to, honey!" was all the old woman's reply; and the lawyer went on: "I have been twice up at West Falls since Dick was taken ill, and I think I have set some reports in circulation there, that may make Miss Mary hesitate, if they do not change the old man's will. How will that do, Aunt Synchy you old black anatomy? Eh?"
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