CHAPTER XVII.
‘We’d better go, Tom,’ Mr Dupuy said, almost pitying them. ‘Upon my word, it’s perfectly true; they neither of them knew a word about it.’
‘No, by Jove, they didn’t,’ Tom Dupuy answered with a sneer, as he walked out into the piazza.—‘What a splendid facer, though, it was, Uncle Theodore, for a confounded upstart nigger of a brown man.—But, I say,’ as they passed out of the piazza and mounted their horses once more by the steps—for they were riding—‘did you ever see anything more disgusting in your life than that woman there—a real white woman, and a born lady, Nora tells me—slobbering over and hugging that great, ugly, hulking, coloured fellow!’
‘He’s white enough to look at,’ Mr Dupuy said reflectively. ‘Poor soul, she married him without knowing anything about it. It’ll be a terrible blow for her, I expect, finding out, now she’s tied to him irrevocably, that he’s nothing more than a common brown man.’
‘She ought to be allowed to get a divorce,’ Tom Dupuy exclaimed warmly. ‘It’s preposterous to think that a born lady, and the daughter of a General Somebody over in England, should be tethered for life to a creature of that sort, whom she’s married under what’s as good as false pretences!’
Meanwhile, the unhappy woman who had thus secured the high prize of Mr Tom Dupuy’s distinguished compassion was sitting on the sofa in the big bare drawing-room, holding her husband’s hand tenderly in hers and soothing him gently by murmuring every now and then in a soft undertone: ‘My darling, how glad we are to know that, after all, it’s nothing, nothing.’
Edward’s stupor lasted for many minutes; not so much because he was deeply hurt or horrified, for there wasn’t much at bottom to horrify him, but simply because he was stunned by the pure novelty and strangeness of that curious situation. A brown man—a brown man! It was too extraordinary! He could hardly awake himself from the one pervading thought that absorbed and possessed for the moment his whole nature. At last, however, he awoke himself slowly. After all, how little it was, compared with their worst fears and anticipations! ‘Thomas,’ he cried to the negro butler, ‘bring round our horses as quick as you can saddle them.—Darling, we must ride up to Agualta this moment, and speak about it all to my father and mother.’
In Trinidad, everybody rides; indeed, there is no other way of getting about from place to place among the mountains, for carriage-roads are there unknown, and only narrow winding horse-paths climb slowly round the interminable peaks and gullies. The Hawthorns’ own house was on the plains just at the foot of the hills; but Agualta and most of the other surrounding houses were up high among the cooler mountains. So the very first thing Marian and Edward had had to do on reaching the island was to provide themselves with a couple of saddle-horses, which they did during their first week’s stay at Agualta. In five minutes the horses were at the door; and Marian, having rapidly slipped on her habit, mounted her pony and proceeded to follow her agitated husband up the slender thread of mountain-road that led tortuously to his father’s house. They rode along in single file, as one always must on these narrow, ledge-like, West Indian bridle-paths, and in perfect silence. At first, indeed, Marian tried to throw out a few casual remarks about the scenery and the tree-ferns, to look as if the disclosure was to her less than nothing—as, indeed, but for Edward’s sake, was actually the case—but her husband was too much wrapped up in his own bitter thoughts to answer her by more than single monosyllables. Not that he spoke unkindly or angrily; on the contrary, his tenderness was profounder than ever, for he knew now to what sort of life he had exposed Marian; but he had no heart just then for talking of any sort; and he felt that until he understood the whole matter more perfectly, words were useless to explain the situation.
As for Marian, one thought mainly possessed her: had even Nora, too, turned against them and forsaken them?
Old Mr Hawthorn met them anxiously on the terrace of Agualta. He saw at once, by their pale and troubled faces, that they now knew at least part of the truth. ‘Well, my boy,’ he said, taking Edward’s hand in his with regretful gentleness, ‘so you have found out the ban that hangs over us?’
‘In part, at least,’ Edward answered, dismounting; and he proceeded to pour forth into his father’s pitying and sympathetic ear the whole story of their stormy interview with the two Dupuys. ‘What can they mean,’ he asked at last, drawing himself up proudly, ‘by calling such people as you and me “brown men,” father?’
The question, as he asked it that moment, in the full sunshine of Agualta Terrace, did indeed seem a very absurd one. Two more perfect specimens of the fair-haired, blue-eyed, pinky-white-skinned Anglo-Saxon type it would have been extremely difficult to discover even in the very heart of England itself, than the father and son who thus faced one another. But old Mr Hawthorn shook his handsome gray old head solemnly and mournfully. ‘It’s quite true, my boy,’ he answered with a painful sigh—‘quite true, every word of it. In the eyes of all Trinidad, of all the West Indies, you and I are in fact coloured people.’
‘But father, dear father,’ Marian said pleadingly, ‘just look at Edward! There isn’t a sign or a mark on him anywhere of anything but the purest English blood! Just look at him, father; how can it be possible?’—and she took up, half unconsciously, his hand—that usual last tell-tale of African descent, but in Edward Hawthorn’s case stainless and white as pure wax. ‘Surely you don’t mean to tell me,’ she said, kissing it with wifely tenderness, ‘there is negro blood—the least, the tiniest fraction, in dear Edward!’
‘Listen to me, dear one,’ the old man said, drawing Marian closer to his side with a fatherly gesture. ‘My father was a white man. Mary’s father was a white man. Our grandfathers on both sides were pure white, and our grandmothers on one side were white also. All our ancestors in the fourth degree were white, save only one—fifteen whites to one coloured out of sixteen quarters—and that one was a mulatto in either line—Mary’s and my great-great-grandmother. In England or any other country of Europe, we should be white—as white as you are. But such external and apparent whiteness isn’t enough by any means for our West Indian prejudices. As long as you have the remotest taint or reminiscence of black blood about you in any way—as long as it can be shown, by tracing your pedigree pitilessly to its fountainhead, that any one of your ancestors was of African origin—then, by all established West Indian reckoning, you are a coloured man, an outcast, a pariah.—You have married a coloured man, Marian; and your children and your grandchildren to the latest generations will all of them for ever be coloured also.’
‘How cruel—how wicked—how abominable!’ Marian cried, flushed and red with sudden indignation. ‘How unjust so to follow the merest shadow or suspicion of negro blood age after age to one’s children’s children!’
‘And how far more unjust still,’ Edward exclaimed with passionate fervour, ‘ever so to judge of any man not by what he is in himself, but by the mere accident of the race or blood from which he is descended!’
Marian flushed again with still deeper colour; she felt in her heart that Edward’s indignation went further than hers, down to the very root and ground of the whole matter.
‘But, O father,’ she began again after a slight pause, clinging passionately both to her husband and to Mr Hawthorn, ‘are they going to visit this crime of birth even on a man of Edward’s character and Edward’s position?’
‘Not on him only,’ the old man whispered with infinite tenderness—‘not on him only, my daughter, my dear daughter—not on him only, but on you—on you, who are one of themselves, an English lady, a true white woman of pure and spotless lineage. You have broken their utmost and sacredest law of race; you have married a coloured man! They will punish you for it cruelly and relentlessly. Though you did it, as he did it, in utter ignorance, they will punish you for it cruelly; and that’s the very bitterest drop in all our bitter cup of ignominy and humiliation.’
There was a moment’s silence, and then Edward cried to him aloud: ‘Father, father, you ought to have told me of this earlier!’
His father drew back at the word as though one had stung him. ‘My boy,’ he answered tremulously, ‘how can you ever reproach me with that? You at least should be the last to reproach me. I sent you to England, and I meant to keep you there. In England, this disgrace would have been nothing—less than nothing. Nobody would ever have known of it, or if they knew of it, minded it in any way. Why should I trouble you with a mere foolish fact of family history utterly unimportant to you over in England? I tried my hardest to prevent you from coming here; I tried to send you back at once when you first came. But do you wonder, now, I shrank from telling you the ban that lies upon all of us here? And do you blame me for trying to spare you the misery I myself and your dear mother have endured without complaining for our whole lifetime?’
‘Father,’ Edward cried again, ‘I was wrong; I was ungrateful. You have done it in all kindness. Forgive me—forgive me!’
‘There is nothing to forgive, my boy—nothing to forgive, Edward. And now, of course, you will go back to England?’
Edward answered quickly: ‘Yes, yes, father; they have conquered—they have conquered—I shall go back to England; and you, too, shall come with me. If it were for my own sake alone, I would stop here even so, and fight it out with them to the end till I gained the victory. But I can’t expose Marian—dear, gently nurtured, tender Marian—to the gibes and scorn of these ill-mannered planter people. She shall never again submit to the insult and contumely she has had to endure this morning.—No, no, Marian darling, we shall go back to England—back to England—back to England!’
‘And why,’ Marian asked, looking up at her father-in-law suddenly, ‘didn’t you yourself leave the country long ago? Why didn’t you go where you could mix on equal terms with your natural equals? Why have you stood so long this horrible, wicked, abominable injustice?’
The old man straightened himself up, and fire flashed from his eyes like an old lion’s as he answered proudly: ‘For Edward! First of all, I stopped here and worked to enable me to bring up my boy where his talents would have the fullest scope in free England. Next, when I had grown rich and prosperous here at Agualta, I stayed on because I wouldn’t be beaten in the battle and driven out of the country by the party of injustice and social intolerance. I wouldn’t yield to them; I wouldn’t give way to them; I wouldn’t turn my back upon the baffled and defeated clique of slave-owners, because, though my father was an English officer, my mother was a slave, Marian!’ He looked so grand and noble an old man as he uttered simply and unaffectedly those last few words—the pathetic epitaph of a terrible dead and buried wrong, still surviving in its remote effects—that Marian threw her arms around his neck passionately, and kissed him with one fervent kiss of love and admiration, almost as tenderly as she had kissed Edward himself in the heat of the first strange discovery.
‘Edward,’ she cried, with resolute enthusiasm, ‘we will not go home! We will not return to England. We, too, will stay and fight out the cruel battle against this wicked prejudice. We will do as your father has done. I love him for it—I honour him for it! To me, it’s less than nothing, my darling, that you should seem to have some small little taint by birth in the eyes of these miserable, little, outlying islanders. To me, it’s less than nothing that they should dare to look down upon you, and to set themselves up against you—you, so great, so learned, so good, so infinitely nobler than them, and better than them in every way! Who are they, the wretched, ignorant, out-of-the-way creatures, that they venture to set themselves up as our superiors? I will not yield, either. I’m my father’s daughter, and I won’t give way to them. Edward, Edward, darling Edward, we will stop here still, we shall stop here and defeat them!’
‘My darling,’ Edward answered, kissing her forehead tenderly, ‘you don’t know what you say; you don’t realise what it would be like for us to live here. I can’t expose you to so much misery and awkwardness. It would be wrong of me—unmanly of me—cowardly of me—to let my wife be constantly met with such abominable, undeserved insult!’
‘Cowardly! Edward,’ Marian cried, stamping her pretty little foot upon the ground impatiently with womanly emphasis, ‘cowardly—cowardly! The cowardice is all the other way, I fancy. I’m not ashamed of my husband, here or anywhere. I love you; I admire you; I respect you. But I can never again respect you so much if you run away, even for my sake, from this unworthy prejudice. I don’t want to live here always, for ever; God forbid! I hate and detest it; but I shall stay here a year—two years—three years, if I like, just to show the hateful creatures that I’m not afraid of them!’
‘No, no, my child,’ old Mr Hawthorn murmured tenderly, smoothing her forehead; ‘this is no home for you, Marian. Go back to England—go back to England!’
Marian turned to him with feverish energy. ‘Father,’ she cried, ‘dear, good, kind, gentle, loving father! You’ve taught me better yourself; your own words have taught me better. I won’t give way to them; I’ll stay in the land where you have stayed, and I’ll show them I’m not ashamed of you or of Edward either! Ashamed! I’m only ashamed to say the word. What is there in either of you for a woman not to be proud of with all the deepest and holiest pride in her whole nature!’
‘My darling,’ Edward answered thoughtfully, ‘we shall have to think and talk more with one another about this wretched, miserable business.’