CHAPTER XXIX.
In spite of his vigorous dislike for Tom Dupuy, Harry Noel continued to stop on at Orange Grove for some weeks together, retained there irresistibly by the potent spell of Nora’s presence. He couldn’t tear himself away from Nora. And Nora, too, though she could never conquer her instinctive prejudice against the dark young Englishman—a prejudice that seemed to be almost ingrained in her very nature—couldn’t help feeling on her side, also, that it was very pleasant to have Harry Noel staying in the house with her; he was such a relief and change after Tom Dupuy and the other sugar-growing young gentlemen of Trinidad! He had some other ideas in his head beside vacuum pans and saccharometers and centrifugals; he could talk about something else besides the crop and the cutting and the boiling. Harry was careful not to recur for the present to the subject of their last conversation at Southampton; he left that important issue aside for a while, till Nora had time to make his acquaintance for herself afresh. A year had passed since she came to Trinidad; she might have changed her mind meanwhile. At nineteen or twenty, one’s views often undergo a rapid expansion. In any case, it would be best to let her have a little time to get to know him better. In his own heart, Harry Noel had inklings of a certain not wholly unbecoming consciousness that he cut a very decent figure indeed in Nora’s eyes, by the side of the awkward, sugar-growing young men of Trinidad.
One afternoon, a week or two later, he was out riding among the plains with Nora, attended behind by the negro groom, when they happened to pass the same corner where he had already met Louis Delgado. The old man was standing there again, cutlass in hand—the cutlass is the common agricultural implement and rural jack-of-all-trades of the West Indies, answering to plough, harrow, hoe, spade, reaping-hook, rake, and pruning-knife in England—and as Nora passed, he dropped her a grudging, half-satirical salutation, something between a bow and a courtesy, as is the primitive custom of the country.
‘A very murderous-looking weapon, the thing that fellow’s got in his hand,’ Harry Noel said, in passing, to his pretty companion as they turned the corner. ‘What on earth does he want to do with it, I wonder?’
‘Oh, that!’ Nora exclaimed carelessly, glancing back at it in an unconcerned fashion. ‘That’s only a cutlass. All our people work with cutlasses, you know. He’s merely going to hoe up the canes with it.’
‘Nasty things for the niggers to have in their hands, in case there should ever be any row in the island,’ Harry murmured half aloud; for the sight of the wild-looking old man ran strangely in his head, and he couldn’t help thinking to himself how much damage could easily be done by a sturdy negro with one of those rude and formidable weapons.
‘Yes,’ Nora answered with a childish laugh, ‘those are just what they always hack us to pieces with, you know, whenever there comes a negro rising. Mr Hawthorn says there’s very likely to be one soon. He thinks the negroes are ripe for rebellion. He knows more about them than any one else, you see; and he’s thoroughly in the confidence of a great many of them, and he says they’re almost all fearfully disaffected. That old man Delgado there, in particular—he’s a shocking old man altogether. He hates papa and Tom Dupuy; and I believe if ever he got the chance, he’d cut every one of our throats in cold blood as soon as look at us.’
‘I trust to goodness he won’t get the chance, then,’ Harry ejaculated earnestly. ‘He seems a most uncivil, ill-conditioned, independent sort of a fellow altogether. I dropped my whip on the road by chance the very first afternoon I came here, and I asked this same man to pick it up for me; and, would you believe it, the old wretch wouldn’t stoop to hand the thing to me; he told me I might just jump off my horse and pick it up for myself, if I wanted to get it! Now, you know, a labourer in England, though he’s a white man like one’s self, would never have dared to answer me that way. He’d have stooped down and picked it up instinctively, the moment he was asked to by any gentleman.’
‘Mr Hawthorn says,’ Nora answered, smiling, ‘that our negroes here are a great deal more independent, and have a great deal more sense of freedom than English country-people, because they were emancipated straight off all in one day, and were told at once: “Now, from this time forth, you’re every bit as free as your masters;” whereas the English peasants, he says, were never regularly emancipated at all, but only slowly and unconsciously came out of serfdom, so that there never was any one day when they felt to themselves that they had become freemen. I’m not quite sure whether that’s exactly how he puts it, but I think it is. Anyhow, I know it’s a fact that all one’s negro women-servants out here are a great deal more independent and saucy than the white maids used to be over in England.’
‘Independence,’ Harry remarked, cracking his short whip with a sharp snap, ‘is a very noble quality, considered in the abstract; but when it comes to taking it in the concrete, I should much prefer for my part not to have it in my own servants.’
(A sentiment, it may be observed in passing, by no means uncommon, even when not expressed, among people who make far more pretensions to democratic feeling than did Harry Noel.)
Louis Delgado, standing behind, and gazing with a malevolent gleam in his cold dark eyes after the retreating buckra figures, beckoned in silence with his skinny hand to the black groom, who came back immediately and unhesitatingly, as if in prompt obedience to some superior officer.
‘You is number forty-tree, I tink,’ the old man said, looking at the groom closely. ‘Yes, yes, dat’s your number. Tell me; you know who is dis buckra from Englan’?’
‘Dem callin’ him Mistah Noel, sah,’ the black groom answered, touching the brim of his hat respectfully.
‘Yes, yes, I know him name; I know dat already,’ Delgado answered with an impatient gesture. ‘But what I want to know is jest dis—can you find out for me from de house-serbants, or anybody up at Orange Grove, where him fader an’ him mudder come from? I want to know all about him.’
‘Missy Rosina find dat out for me,’ the groom answered, grinning broadly. ‘Missy Rosina is de young le-ady’s waitin’-maid; an’ de young le-ady, him tell Rosina pretty well eberyting. Rosina, she is Isaac Pourtalès’ new sweetheart.’
Delgado nodded in instantaneous acquiescence. ‘All right, number forty-tree,’ he answered, cutting him short carelessly. ‘Ride after buckra, an’ say no more about it. I get it all out ob him now, surely. I know Missy Rosina well, for true. I gib him de lub of Isaac Pourtalès wit me obeah, I tellin’ you. Send Missy Rosina to me dis ebenin’. I has plenty ting I want to talk about wit her.’