CHAPTER XXX.
That evening, Rosina Fleming went as she was bid to the old African’s tent about half-past eleven, groping her way along the black moonless roads in fear and trembling, with infinite terror of the all-pervading and utterly ghastly West Indian ghosts or duppies. It was a fearful thing to go at that time of night to the hut of an obeah man; heaven knows what grinning, gibbering ghouls and phantoms one might chance to come across in such a place at such an hour. But it would have been more fearful still to stop away; for Delgado, who could so easily bring her Isaac Pourtalès for a lover by his powerful spells, could just as easily burn her to powder with his thunder and lightning, or send the awful duppies to torment her in her bed, as she lay awake trembling through the night-watches. So poor Rosina groped her way fearfully round to Delgado’s hut with wild misgivings, and lifted the latch with quivering fingers, when she heard its owner’s gruff, ‘Come in den, missy,’ echoing grimly from the inner recesses.
When she opened the door, however, she was somewhat relieved to find within a paraffin lamp burning brightly; and in place of ghouls or ghosts or duppies, Isaac Pourtalès himself, jauntily seated smoking a fresh tobacco-leaf cigarette of his own manufacture, in the corner of the hut where Louis Delgado was sitting cross-legged on the mud floor.
‘Ebenin’, missy,’ Delgado said, rising with African politeness to greet her; while the brown Barbadian, without moving from his seat, allowed his lady-love to stoop down of herself to kiss him affectionately. ‘I send for you dis ebenin’ becase we want to know suffin’ about dis pusson dat callin’ himself buckra, an’ stoppin’ now at Orange Grobe wit you. What you know about him, tell us dat, missy. You is Missy Dupuy own serbin’-le-ady: him gwine to tell you all him secret. What you know about dis pusson Noel?’
Thus adjured, Rosina Fleming, sitting down awkwardly on the side of the rude wooden settee, and with her big white eyes fixed abstractedly upon the grinning skull that decorated the bare mud wall just opposite her, pulled her turban straight upon her woolly locks with coquettish precision, and sticking one finger up to her mouth like a country child, began to pour forth all she could remember of the Orange Grove servants’ gossip about Harry Noel. Delgado listened impatiently to the long recital without ever for a moment trying to interrupt her; for long experience had taught him the lesson that little was to be got out of his fellow-countrywomen by deliberate cross-questioning, but a great deal by allowing them quietly to tell their own stories at full length in their own rambling, childish fashion.
At last, when Rosina, with eyes kept always timidly askance, half the time upon the frightful skull, and half the time on Isaac Pourtalès, had fairly come to the end of her tether, the old African ventured, with tentative cunning, to put a leading question: ‘You ebber hear dem say at de table, missy, who him mudder and fader is, and where dem come from?’
‘Him fader is very great gentleman ober in Englan’,’ Rosina answered confidently—‘very grand gentleman, wit house an’ serbant, an’ coach an’ horses, an’ plenty cane-piece, an’ rum an’ sugar, an’ yam garden an’ plantain, becase I ’member Aunt Clemmy say so; an’ de missy him say so himself too, sah. An’ de missy say dat de pusson dat marry him will be real le-ady—same like de gubbernor le-ady; real le-ady, like dem hab in Englan’. De missy tellin’ me all about him dis bery ebenin’.’
Delgado smiled. ‘Den de missy in lub wit him himself, for certain,’ he answered with true African shrewdness and cynicism. ‘Ole-time folk has proverb, “When naygur woman say, ‘Dat fowl fat,’ him gwine to steal him same ebenin’ for him pickany dinner.” An’ when le-ady tell you what happen to gal dat marry gentleman, him want to hab de gentleman himself for him own husband.’
‘O no, sah; dat doan’t so,’ Rosina cried with sudden energy. ‘De missy doan’t lubbin’ de buckra gentleman at all. She tell me him look altogedder too much like naygur.’
Delgado and Pourtalès exchanged meaning looks with one another, but neither of them answered a word to Rosina.
‘An’ him mudder?’ Delgado inquired curiously after a moment’s pause, taking a lazy puff at a cigarette which Isaac handed him.
‘Him mudder!’ Rosina said. ‘Ah, dere now, I forgettin’ clean what Uncle ’Zekiel, him what is butler up to de house dar, an’ hear dem talk wit one anodder at dinner—I forgettin’ clean what it was him tell me about him mudder.’
Delgado did not urge her to rack her feeble little memory on this important question, but waited silently, with consummate prudence, till she should think of it herself and come out with it spontaneously.
‘Ha, dere now,’ Rosina cried at last, after a minute or two of vacant and steady staring at the orbless eyeholes of the skull opposite; ‘I is too chupid—too chupid altogedder. Mistah ’Zekiel, him tellin’ me de odder marnin’ dat Mistah Noel’s mudder is le-ady from Barbadoes.—Dat whar you come from youself, Isaac, me fren’. You must be ’memberin’ de family ober in Barbadoes.’
‘How dem call de family?’ Isaac asked cautiously. ‘You ebber hear, Rosie, how dem call de family? Tell me, dar is good girl, an’ I gwine to lub you better’n ebber.’
Rosina hesitated, and cudgelled her poor brains eagerly a few minutes longer; then another happy flash of recollection came across her suddenly like an inspiration, and she cried out in a joyous tone: ‘Yes, yes; I got him now, I got him now, Isaac! Him mudder family deir name is Budleigh, an’ dem lib at place dem call de Wilderness. Mistah ’Zekiel tell me all about dem. Him say dat dis le-ady, what him name Missy Budleigh, marry de buckra gentleman fader, what him name Sir-waltah Noel.’
It was an enormous and unprecedented fetch of memory for a pure-blooded black woman, and Rosina Fleming was justly proud of it. She stood there grinning and smiling from ear to ear, so that even the skull upon the wall opposite was simply nowhere in the competition.
Delgado turned breathlessly to Isaac Pourtalès. ‘You know dis fam’ly?’ he asked with eager anticipation. ‘You ebber hear ob dem? You larn at all whedder dem is buckra or only brown people?’
Louis Delgado laughed hoarsely. Brown man as he was himself, he chuckled and hugged himself with sardonic delight over the anticipated humiliation of a fellow brown man who thought himself a genuine buckra.
‘Know dem, sah!’ Isaac cried in a perfect ecstasy of malicious humour—‘know de Budleighs ob de Wilderness! I tink for true I know dem! Hé! Mistah Delgado, me fren’, I tellin’ you de trut, sah; me own mudder an’ Mrs Budleigh ob de Wilderness is first-cousin, first-cousin to one anudder.’
It was perfectly true. Strange as such a relationship sounds to English ears, in the West Indies cases of the sort are as common as earthquakes. In many a cultivated light-brown family, where the young ladies of the household, pretty and well educated, expect and hope to marry an English officer of good connections, the visitor knows that, in some small room or other of the back premises, there still lingers on feebly an old black hag, wrinkled and toothless, full of strange oaths and incomprehensible African jargons, who is nevertheless the grandmother of the proud and handsome girls, busy over Mendelssohn’s sonatas and the Saturday Review, in the front drawing-room. Into such a family it was that Sir Walter Noel, head of the great Lincolnshire house, had actually married. The Budleighs of the Wilderness had migrated to England before the abolition of slavery, when the future Lady Noel was still a baby; and getting easily into good society in London, had only been known as West Indian proprietors in those old days when to be a West Indian proprietor was still equivalent to wealth and prosperity, not, as now, to poverty and bankruptcy.
Strange to say, too, Lady Noel herself was not by any means so dark as her son Harry. The Lincolnshire Noels belonged themselves to the black-haired type so common in their county; and the union of the two strains had produced in Harry a complexion several degrees more swarthy than that of either of his handsome parents. In England, nobody would ever have noticed this little peculiarity; they merely said that Harry was the very image of the old Noel family portraits; but in Trinidad, where the abiding traces of negro blood are so familiarly known and so carefully looked for, it was almost impossible for him to pass a single day without his partially black descent being immediately suspected. He had ‘thrown back,’ as the colonists coarsely phrase it, to the dusky complexion of his quadroon ancestors.
Louis Delgado hugged himself and grinned at this glorious discovery. ‘Ha, ha!’ he cried, rocking himself rapidly to and fro in a perfect frenzy of gratified vindictiveness; ‘him doan’t buckra, den!—him doan’t buckra! He hold himself so proud, an’ look down on naygur; an’ after all, him doan’t buckra, him only brown man! De Lard be praise, I gwine to humble him! I gwine to let him know him doan’t buckra!’
‘You will tell him?’ Rosina Fleming asked curiously.
Delgado danced about the hut in a wild ecstasy, with his fingers snapping about in every direction, like the half-tamed African savage that he really was. ‘Tell him, Missy Rosie!’ he echoed contemptuously—‘tell him, you sayin’ to me! Yah, yah! you hab no sense, missy. I doan’t gwine to tell him, for certain; I gwine to tell dat cheatin’ scoundrel, Tom Dupuy, missy, so humble him in de end de wuss for all dat.’
Rosina gazed at him in puzzled bewilderment. ‘Tom Dupuy!’ she repeated slowly. ‘You gwine to tell Tom Dupuy, you say, Mistah Delgado! What de debbel de use, I wonder, sah, ob tell Tom Dupuy dat de buckra gentleman an’ Isaac is own cousin?’
Delgado executed another frantic pas de seul across the floor of the hut, to work off his mad excitement, and then answered gleefully: ‘Ha, ha, Missy Rosie, you is woman, you is creole naygur gal—you doan’t understan’ de depth an’ de wisdom ob African naygur. Look you here, me fren’, I explain you all about it. De missy up at house, him fall in lub wit dis brown man, Noel. Tom Dupuy, him want for go an’ marry de missy. Dat make Tom Dupuy hate de brown man. I tell him, Noel doan’t no buckra—him common brown man, own cousin to Isaac Pourtalès. Den Tom Dupuy laugh at Noel! Ha, ha! I turn de hand ob one proud buckra to bring down de pride ob de odder!’
Isaac Pourtalès laughed too. ‘Ha, ha!’ he cried, ‘him is proud buckra, an’ him is me own cousin! I hate him!’
Rosina gazed at her mulatto lover in rueful silence. She liked the English stranger—he had given her a shilling one day to post a letter for him—but still, she daren’t go back upon Isaac and Louis Delgado. ‘Him is fren’ ob Mistah Hawtorn,’ she murmured apologetically at last after a minute’s severe reflection—‘great fren’ ob Mistah Hawtorn. Dem is old-time fren’ in Englan’ togedder; and when Mistah Tom Dupuy speak bad ’bout Mistah Hawtorn, Mistah Noel him flare up like angry naygur, an’ him gib him de lie, an’ him speak out well for him!’
Delgado checked himself, and looked closely at the hesitating negress with more deliberation. ‘Him is fren’ ob Mistah Hawtorn,’ he said in a meditative voice—‘him is fren’ ob Mistah Hawtorn! De fren’ ob de Lard’s fren’ shall come to no harm. I gwine to tell Tom Dupuy. I must humble de buckra. But in de great an’ terrible day, dem shall not hurt a hair of him head, if de Lard wills it.’ And then he added somewhat louder, in his own sonorous and mystic Arabic: ‘The effendi’s brother is dear to Allah even as the good effendi himself is.’
Isaac Pourtalès made a wry face aside to himself. Evidently he had settled in his own mind that whatever might be Delgado’s private opinion about the friends of the Lord’s friend, he himself was not going to be bound, when the moment for action actually arrived, by anybody else’s ideas of promises.
By-and-by, Rosina rose to go. ‘You is comin’ wit me, Isaac?’ she asked coquettishly, with her finger stuck once more in coy reserve at the corner of her mouth, and her head a little on one side, bewitching negress fashion.
Isaac hesitated; it does not do for a brown man to be too condescending and familiar with a nigger girl, even if she does happen to be his sweetheart. Besides, Delgado signed to him with his withered finger that he wanted him to stop a few minutes longer. ‘No, Missy Rosie,’ the mulatto answered, yawning quietly; ‘I doan’t gwine yet. You know de road to house, I tink. Ebenin’, le-ady.’
Rosina gave a sighing, sidelong look of disappointed affection, took her lover’s hand a little coldly in her own black fingers, and sidled out of the hut with much reluctance, half-frightened still at the horrid prospect of once more facing alone the irrepressible and ubiquitous ghouls.
As soon as she was fairly out of earshot, Louis Delgado approached at once close to the mulatto’s ear and murmured in a mysterious hollow undertone: ‘Next Wednesday.’
The mulatto started. ‘So soon as dat!’ he cried. ‘Den you has got de pistols?’
Delgado, with his wrinkled finger placed upon his lip, moved stealthily to a corner of his hut, and slowly opened a chest, occupied on the top by his mouldy obeah mummery of loose alligators’ teeth and well-cleaned little human knuckle-bones. Carefully removing this superstitious rubbish from the top of the box with an undisguised sneer—for Isaac as a brown man was ex officio superior to obeah—he took from beneath it a couple of dozen old navy pistols, of a disused pattern, bought cheap from a marine store-dealer of doubtful honesty down at the harbour. Isaac’s eyes gleamed brightly as soon as he saw the goodly array of real firearms. ‘Hé, hé!’ he cried joyously, fingering the triggers with a loving touch, ‘dat de ting to bring down de pride ob de proud buckra. Ha, ha! Next Wednesday, next Wednesday! We waited long, Mistah Delgado, for de Lard’s delibberance; but de time come now, de time come at last, sah, an’ we gwine to hab de island ob Trinidad all to ourselves.’
The old African bowed majestically. ‘Slay ebbery male among dem,’ he answered aloud in his deepest accents, with a not wholly unimpressive mouthing of his hollow vowels—‘slay ebbery male, an’ take de women captive, an’ de maidens, an’ de little ones; an’ divide among you de spoil ob all deir cattle, an’ all deir flocks, an’ all deir goods, an’ deir cities wherein dey dwell, an’ all deir vineyards, an’ deir goodly castles.’
Isaac Pourtalès’ eyes gleamed hideously as he listened in delight to that awful quotation.