CHAPTER XXV.
They had reached the top of the stone steps, when two voices were borne upon them from the two ends of the corridor opposite. The first was Mr Dupuy’s. ‘Where is she?’ it said.—‘Mrs Pereira, where’s Nora? You don’t mean to say this is true that Tom tells me—that you’ve actually gone and let her sit out a dance with that conceited nigger fellow, Dr Whitaker? Upon my word, my dear madam, what this island is coming to nowadays is really more than I can imagine.’
The second voice was a louder and blander one. ‘My son, my son,’ it said, in somewhat thick accents, ‘my dear son, Wilberforce Clarkson Whitaker! Where is he? Is he in de garden? I want to introduce him to de governor’s lady. De governor’s lady has been graciously pleased to express an interes in de inheritor of de tree names most closely bound up wit de great social revolution, in which I have had de honour to be de chief actor, for de benefit of millions of my fellow-subjecks.—Walkin’ in de garden, is he, wit de daughter of my respected friend, de Honourable Teodore Dupuy of Orange Garden? Ha, ha! Dat’s de way wit de young dogs—dat’s de way wit dem! Always off walkin’ in de garden wit de pretty ladies. Ha, ha, ha! I doan’t blame dem!’
Dr Whitaker, his face on fire and his ears tingling, pushed on rapidly down the very centre of the garden, taking no heed of either voice in outward seeming, but going straight on, with Nora on his arm, till he reached the open window-doors that led directly into the big ballroom. There, seething in soul, but outwardly calm and polite, he handed over his partner with a conventional smile to Captain Castello, and turning on his heel, strode away bitterly across the ballroom to the outer doorway. Not a few people noticed him as he strode off in his angry dignity, for Tom Dupuy had already been blustering—with his usual taste—in the corridors and refreshment room about his valiant threat of soundly horsewhipping the woolly-headed mulatto. In the vestibule, the doctor paused and asked for his dust-coat. A negro servant, in red livery, grinning with delight at what he thought the brown man’s discomfiture, held it up for him to put his arms into. Dr Whitaker noticed the fellow’s malevolent grin, and making an ineffectual effort to push his left arm down the right arm sleeve, seized the coat angrily in his hand, doubled it up in a loose fold over his elbow, and then, changing his mind, as an angry man will do, flung it down again with a hasty gesture upon the hall table. ‘Never mind the coat,’ he said fiercely. ‘Bring round my horse! Do you hear, fellow? My horse, my horse! This minute, I tell you!’
The red-liveried servant called to an invisible negro outside, who soon returned with the doctor’s mountain pony.
‘Better take de coat, sah,’ the man in livery said with a sarcastic guffaw. ‘Him help to proteck your back an’ sides from Mistah Dupuy, him horsewhip!’
Dr Whitaker leapt upon his horse, and turned to the man with a face livid and distorted with irrepressible anger. ‘You black scoundrel, you!’ he cried passionately, using the words of reproach that even a mulatto will hurl in his wrath at his still darker brother, ‘do you think I’m running away from Tom Dupuy’s miserable horsewhip? I’m not afraid of a hundred fighting Dupuys and all their horsewhips.—You black image, you! how dare you speak to me? How dare you?—how dare you?’ And he cut out at him viciously in impotent rage with the little riding-whip he held in his fingers.
The negro laughed again, a loud hoarse laugh, and flung both his hands up with open fingers in African derision. Dr Whitaker dug his spurless heel deep into his horse’s side, sitting there wildly in his evening dress, and turned his head in mad despair out towards the outer darkness. The moon was still shining brightly overhead, but by contrast with the lights in the gaily illuminated ballroom, the path beneath the bamboo clumps in the shrubbery looked very gloomy, dark, and sombre.
Two or three of the younger men, anxious to see whether Tom Dupuy would get up ‘a scene’ then and there, crowded out hastily to the doorway, to watch the nigger fellow ride away for his life for fear of a horsewhipping. As they stood in the doorway, peering into the darkness after the retreating upright figure, there came all at once, with appalling suddenness, a solitary vivid flash of lightning, such as one never sees outside the tropics, illuminating with its awful light the whole length of the gardens and the gully beneath them. At the same second, a terrific clap of thunder seemed to burst, like innumerable volleys of the heaviest artillery, right above the roof of the governor’s bungalow. It was ghastly in its suddenness and in its strength. No one could say where the lightning struck, for it seemed to have struck on every side at once: all that they saw was a single sheet of all-pervading fire, in whose midst the mulatto and his horse stood silhouetted out in solid black, a statuesque group of living sculpture, against the brilliant fiery background. The horse was rearing, erect on his hind-legs; and Dr Whitaker was reining him in and patting his neck soothingly with hand half lifted. So instantaneous was the flash, indeed, that no motion or change of any sort was visible in the figures. The horse looked like a horse of bronze, poised in the air on solid metal legs, and merely simulating the action of rearing.
For a minute or two, not a soul spoke a word, or broke in any way the deathless silence that succeeded that awful and unexpected outburst. The band had ceased playing as if by instinct, and every person in the whole ballroom stood still and looked one at another with mute amazement. Then, by a common impulse, they pressed all out slowly together, and gazed forth with wondering eyes upon the serene moonlight. The stars were shining brightly overhead: the clap had broken from an absolutely clear sky. Only to northward, on the very summits of the highest mountains, a gathering of deep black clouds rolled slowly onward, and threatened to pass across the intervening valley. Through the profound silence, the ring of Dr Whitaker’s horse’s hoofs could be heard distinctly down below upon the solid floor of the mountain pathway.
‘Who has left already?’ the governor asked anxiously of the negro servants.
‘Dr Whitaker, your Excellency, sah,’ the man in red livery answered, grinning respectfully.
‘Call him back!’ the governor said in a tone of command. ‘There’s an awful thunderstorm coming. No man will ever get down alive to the bottom of the valley until it’s over.’
‘It doan’t no use, sah,’ the negro answered. ‘His horse’s canterin’ down de hillside de same as if him starin’ mad, sah!’ And as he spoke, Dr Whitaker’s white shirt-front gleamed for a second in the moonlight far below, at a turn of the path beside the threatening gully.
Almost before any one could start to recall him, the rain and thunder were upon them with tropical violence. The clouds had drifted rapidly across the sky; the light of the moon was completely effaced; black darkness reigned over the mountains; not a star, not a tree, not an object of any sort could now be discerned through the pitchy atmosphere. Rain! it was hardly rain, but rather a continuous torrent outpoured as from some vast aërial fountain. Every minute or two, a terrific flash lighted up momentarily the gloomy darkness; and almost simultaneously, loud peals of thunder bellowed and re-echoed from peak to peak. The dance was interrupted for the time at least, and everybody crowded out silently to the veranda and the corridors, where the lightning and the rain could be more easily seen, mingling with the thunder in one hideous din, and forming torrents that rushed down the dry gullies in roaring cataracts to the plains below.
And Dr Whitaker? On he rode, the lightning terrifying his little mountain pony at every flash, the rain beating down upon him mercilessly with equatorial fierceness, the darkness stretching in front of him and below him, save when, every now and then, the awful forks of flame illumined for a second the gulfs and precipices that yawned beneath in profoundest gloom. Yet still he rode on, erect and heedless, his hat now lost, bareheaded to the pitiless storm, cold without, and fiery hot at heart within. He cared for nothing now—for nothing—for nothing. Nora had put the final coping-stone on that grim growth of black despair within his soul, that palace of nethermost darkness which alone he was henceforth to inhabit. Nay, in the heat and bitterness of the moment, had he not even sealed his own doom? Had he not sunk down actually to the level of those who despised and contemned him? Had he not been guilty of contemptuous insolence to his own colour, in the words he had flung so wildly at the head of the negro in livery? What did it matter now whatever happened to him? All, all was lost; and he rode on recklessly, madly, despairingly, down that wild and precipitous mountain pathway, he knew not and he cared not whither.
It was a narrow track, a mere thread of bridle-path, dangerous enough even in the best of seasons, hung half-way up the steep hillside, with the peak rising sheer above on one hand, and the precipice yawning black beneath on the other. Stones and creepers cumbered the ground; pebbles and earth, washed down at once by the violence of the storm, blocked and obliterated the track in many places; here, a headlong torrent tore across it with resistless vehemence; there, a little chasm marked the spot where a small landslip had rendered it impassable. The horse floundered and reared and backed up again and again in startled terror; Dr Whitaker, too reckless at last even to pat and encourage him, let him go whatever way his fancy led him among the deep brake of cactuses and tree ferns. And still the rain descended in vast sheets and flakes of water, and still the lightning flashed and quivered among the ravines and gullies of those torn and crumpled mountain-sides. The mulatto took no notice any longer; he only sang aloud in a wild, defiant, half-crazy voice the groaning notes of his own terrible Hurricane Symphony.
So they went, on and down, on and down, on and down always, through fire and water, the horse plunging and kicking and backing; the rider flinging his arms carelessly around him, till they reached the bend in the road beside Louis Delgado’s mud cottage. The old African was sitting cross-legged by himself at the door of his hut, watching the rain grimly by the intermittent light of the frequent flashes. Suddenly, a vivider flash than any burst in upon him with a fearful clap; and by its light, he saw a great gap in the midst of the path, twenty yards wide, close by the cottage; and at its upper end, a horse and rider, trembling on the very brink of the freshly cut abyss. Next instant, the flash was gone, and when the next came, Louis Delgado saw nothing but the gap itself and the wild torrent that had so instantly cut it. The old man smiled an awful smile of gratified malevolence. ‘Ha, ha!’ he said to himself aloud, hugging his withered old breast in malicious joy; ‘I guess dat buckra lyin’ dead by now, down, down, down, at de bottom ob de gully. Ha, ha; ha, ha, ha; him lyin’ dead at de bottom ob de gully; an’ it one buckra de less left alive to bodder us here in de island ob Trinidad.’ He had not seen the mulatto’s face; but he took him at once to be a white man because, in spite of rain and spattered mud, his white shirt-front still showed out distinctly in the red glare of the vivid lightning.