CHAPTER XXIII.
The governor’s dance was the great event of the Trinidad season—the occasion to which every girl in the whole island looked forward for months with the intensest interest. And it was also a great event to Dr Whitaker; for it was the one time and place, except the Hawthorns’ drawing-room, where he could now meet Nora Dupuy on momentary terms of seeming equality. In the eye of the law, even in Trinidad, white men, black men, and brown men are all equal; and under the governor’s roof, as became the representative of law and order in the little island, there were no invidious distinctions of persons between European and negro. Every well-to-do inhabitant, irrespective of cuticular peculiarities, was duly bidden to the governor’s table: ebony and ivory mingled freely together once in a moon at the governor’s At Homes and dances. And Dr Whitaker had made up his mind that on that one solitary possible occasion he would venture on his sole despairing appeal to Nora Dupuy, and stand or fall by her final answer.
It was not without serious misgivings that the mulatto doctor had at last decided upon thus tempting Providence. He was weary of the terrible disillusion that had come upon him on his return to the home of his fathers; weary of the painfully vulgar and narrow world into which he had been cast by unrelenting circumstances. He could not live any longer in Trinidad. Let him fight it out as he would for the sake of his youthful ideals, the battle had clearly gone against him, and there was nothing left for him now but to give it up in despair and fly to England. He had talked the matter over with Edward Hawthorn—not, indeed, the question of proposing to Nora Dupuy, for that he held too sacred for any other ear, but the question of remaining in the island and fighting down the unconquerable prejudice—and even Edward had counselled him to go; for he felt how vastly different were the circumstances of the struggle in his own case and in those of the poor young mulatto doctor. He himself had only to fight against the social prejudices of men his real inferiors in intellect and culture and moral standing. Dr Whitaker had to face as well the utterly uncongenial brown society into which he had been rudely pitchforked by fate, like a gentleman into the midst of a pot-house company. It was best for them all that Dr Whitaker should take himself away to a more fitting environment; and Edward had himself warmly advised him to return once more to free England.
The governor’s dance was given, not at Government House in the Plains, but at Banana Garden, the country bungalow, perched high up on a solitary summit of the Westmoreland mountains. The big ballroom was very crowded; and Nora Dupuy, in a pale, maize-coloured evening dress, was universally recognised by black, brown, and white alike as the belle of the evening. She danced almost every round with one partner after another; and it was not till almost half the evening had passed away that Dr Whitaker got the desired chance of even addressing her. The chance came at last just before the fifth waltz, a dance that Nora had purposely left vacant, in case she should happen to pick up in the earlier part of the evening an exceptionally agreeable and promising partner. She was sitting down to rest for a moment beside her chaperon of the night, on a bench placed just outside the window in the tropical garden, when the young mulatto, looking every inch a gentleman in his evening dress—the first time Nora had ever seen him so attired—strolled anxiously up to her, with ill-affected carelessness, and bowed a timid bow to his former travelling companion. Pure opposition to Mr Dupuy, and affection for the two Hawthorns, had made Nora exceptionally gracious just that moment to all brown people; and, on purpose to scandalise her ‘absurdly punctilious’ chaperon, she returned the doctor’s hesitating salute with a pleasant smile of perfect cordiality. ‘Dr Whitaker!’ she cried, leaning over towards him in a kindly way, which made the poor mulatto’s heart flutter terribly; ‘so here you are, as you promised! I’m so glad you’ve come this evening.—And have you brought Miss Whitaker with you?’
The mulatto hesitated and stammered. She could not possibly have asked him a more mal à propos question. The poor young man looked about him feebly, and then answered in a low voice: ‘Yes; my father and sister are here somewhere.’
‘Nora, my dear,’ her chaperon said in a tone of subdued feminine thunder, ‘I didn’t know you had the pleasure of Miss Whitaker’s acquaintance.’
‘Neither have I, Mrs Pereira; but perhaps Dr Whitaker will be good enough to introduce me.—Not now, thank you, Dr Whitaker; I don’t want you to run away this minute and fetch your sister. Some other time will do as well. It’s so seldom, you know, we have the chance of a good talk now, together.’
Dr Whitaker smiled and stammered. It was possible, of course, to accept Nora’s reluctance in either of two senses: she might be anxious that he should stop and talk to her; or she might merely wish indefinitely to postpone the pleasure of making Miss Euphemia’s personal acquaintance; but she flooded him so with the light of her eyes as she spoke, that he chose to put the most flattering of the two alternative interpretations upon her ambiguous sentence.
‘You are very good to say so,’ he answered, still timidly; and Nora noticed how very different was his manner of speaking now from the self-confident Dr Whitaker of the old Severn days. Trinidad had clearly crushed all the confidence as well as all the enthusiasm clean out of him. ‘You are very good, indeed, Miss Dupuy; I wish the opportunities for our meeting occurred oftener.’
He stood talking beside her for a minute or two longer, uttering the mere polite commonplaces of ballroom conversation—the heat of the evening, the shortcomings of the band, the beauty of the flowers—when suddenly Nora gave a little jump and seized her programme with singular discomposure. Dr Whitaker looked up at once, and divined by instinct the cause of her hasty movement. Tom Dupuy, just fresh from the cane-cutting, was looking about for her down the long corridor at the opposite end of the inner garden. ‘Where’s my cousin? Have you seen my cousin?’ he was asking everybody; for the seat where Nora was sitting with Mrs Pereira stood under the shade of a big papaw tree, and so it was impossible for him to discern her face, though she could see his features quite distinctly.
‘I won’t dance with that horrid man, my cousin Tom!’ Nora said in her most decided voice. ‘I’m quite sure he’s coming here this minute on purpose to ask me.’
‘Is your programme full?’ Dr Whitaker inquired with a palpitating heart.
‘No; not quite,’ she answered, and handed it to him encouragingly. There was just one dance still left vacant—the next waltz. ‘I’m too tired to dance it out,’ Nora cried pettishly. ‘The horrid man! I hope he won’t see me.’
‘He’s coming this way, dear,’ Mrs Pereira put in with placid composure. ‘You’ll have to sit it out with him, now; there’s no help for it.’
‘Sit it out with him!—sit it out with Tom Dupuy! O no, Mrs Pereira; I wouldn’t do it for a thousand guineas.’
‘What will you do, then?’ Dr Whitaker asked tremulously, still holding the programme and pencil in his undecided hand. Dare he—dare he ask her to dance just once with him?
‘What shall I do?—Why, nothing simpler. Have an engagement already, of course, Dr Whitaker.’
She looked at him significantly. Tom Dupuy was just coming up. If Dr Whitaker meant to ask her, there was no time to be lost. His knees gave way beneath him, but he faltered out at last in some feeble fashion: ‘Then, Miss Dupuy, may I—may I—may I have the pleasure?’
To Mrs Pereira’s immense dismay, Nora immediately smiled and nodded. ‘I can’t dance it with you,’ she said with a hasty gesture—she shrank, naturally, from that open confession of faith before the whole assembled company—‘but if you’ll allow me, I’ll sit it out with you here in the garden. You may put your name down for it, if you like. Quickly, please—write it quickly; here’s Tom Dupuy just coming.’
The mulatto had hardly scratched his own name with shaky pencilled letters on the little card, when Tom Dupuy swaggered up in his awkward, loutish, confident manner, and with a contemptuous nod of condescending half-recognition to the overjoyed mulatto, asked, in his insular West Indian drawl, whether Nora could spare him a couple of dances.
‘Your canes seem to have delayed you too late, Tom Dupuy,’ Nora answered coldly. ‘Dr Whitaker has just asked me for my last vacancy. You should come earlier to a dance, you know, if you want to find a good partner.’
Tom Dupuy stared hard at her face in puzzled astonishment. ‘Your last vacancy!’ he cried incredulously. ‘Dr Whitaker! No more dances to spare, Nora! No, no, I say; this won’t do, you know! You’ve done this on purpose.—Let me have a squint at your programme, will you?’
‘If you don’t choose to take my word for the facts,’ Nora answered haughtily, ‘you can see the names and numbers of my engagements for yourself on my programme.—Dr Whitaker, have the kindness to hand my cousin my programme, if you please.—Thank you.’
Tom Dupuy took the programme ungraciously, and glanced down it with an angry eye. He read every name out aloud till he came to number eleven, ‘Dr Whitaker.’ As he reached that name, his lip curled with an ugly suddenness, and he handed the bit of cardboard back coldly to his defiant cousin. ‘Very well, Miss Nora,’ he answered with a sneer. ‘You’re quite at liberty, of course, to choose your own company however it pleases you. I see your programme’s quite full; but your list of names is rather comprehensive than select, I fancy.—The last name was written down as I was coming towards you. This is a plot to insult me.—Dr Whitaker, we shall settle this little difference elsewhere, probably—with the proper weapon—a horsewhip. Though your ancestors, to be sure, were better accustomed, I believe, sir, to a good raw cowhide.—Good-evening, Miss Nora.—Good-evening, Dr Whitaker.’
The mulatto’s eyes flashed fire, but he replied with a low and stately bow, in suppressed accents: ‘I shall be ready to answer you in this matter whenever you wish, Mr Dupuy—and with your own weapon. Good-evening.’ And he held out his arm quietly to Nora.
Nora rose and took the mulatto’s proffered arm at once with a sweeping air of utter indifference. ‘Shall we take a turn round the gardens, Dr Whitaker?’ she asked calmly, reassuring herself at the same time with a rapid glance that nobody except poor frightened Mrs Pereira had overheard this short altercation.—‘How lovely the moon looks to-night! What an exquisite undertone of green in the long shadows of those columns in the portico!’
‘Undertone of green!’ Tom Dupuy exclaimed aloud in vulgar derision (he was too much of a clod to see that his cue in the scene was fairly past, and that dignity demanded of him now to keep perfectly silent). ‘Undertone of green, indeed, with her precious nigger!—Mrs Pereira, this is your fault! A pretty sort of chaperon you make, upon my word, to let her go and engage herself to sit out a dance with a common mulatto!—Where’s Uncle Theodore? Where is he, I tell you? I shall run and fetch him this very minute. I always said that in the end that girl Nora would go and marry a woolly-headed brown man.’