CHAPTER XXXI.
Delgado had fixed ‘the great and terrible day’ for Wednesday evening. On Monday afternoon, Harry and Nora, accompanied by Mr Dupuy, went for a ride in the cool of dusk among the hills together. Trinidad that day was looking its very best. The tall and feathery bamboos that overhung the serpentine pathways stood out in exquisite clearness of outline, like Japanese designs, against the tender background of pearl-gray sky. The tree ferns rose lush and green among the bracken after yesterday’s brief and refreshing thunder-shower. The scarlet hibiscus trees beside the negro huts were in the full blush of their first flowering season. The poinsettias, not, as in England, mere stiff standard plants from florists’ cuttings, but rising proudly into graceful trees of free and rounded growth, with long drooping branches, spread all about their great rosettes of crimson leaflets to the gorgeous dying sunlight. The broad green foliage of the ribbed bananas in the negro gardens put to shame the flimsy tropical make-believes of Kew or Monte Carlo. For the first time, it seemed to Harry Noel he was riding through the true and beautiful tropics of poets and painters; and the reason was not difficult to guess, for Nora—Nora really seemed to be more kindly disposed to him. After all, she was not made of stone, and they had an interest in common which the rest of the house of Dupuy did not share with Nora—the interest in Edward and Marian Hawthorn. You can’t have a better introduction to any girl’s heart—though I daresay it may be very wicked indeed to acknowledge it—than a common attachment to somebody or something tabooed or opposed by the parental authorities.
Mr Dupuy rode first in the little single-file cavalcade, as became the senior; and Mr Dupuy’s cob had somehow a strange habit of keeping fifty yards ahead of the other horses, which gave its owner on this particular occasion no little trouble. Harry and Nora followed behind at a respectful distance; and Harry, who had bought a new horse of his own the day before, and who brought up the rear on his fresh mount, seemed curiously undesirous of putting his latest purchase through its paces, as one might naturally have expected him to do under the circumstances. On the contrary, he hung about behind most unconscionably, delaying Nora by every means in his power; and Mr Dupuy, looking back from his cob every now and again, grew almost weary of calling out a dozen times over: ‘Now then, Nora, you can canter up over this little bit of level, and catch me up, can’t you, surely?’
‘If it weren’t for the old gentleman,’ Harry thought to himself more than once, ‘I really think I should take this opportunity of speaking again to Nora’—he always called her ‘Nora’ in his own heart—a well-known symptom of the advanced stages of the disease—though she was of course ‘Miss Dupuy’ alone in conversation. ‘Or even if we were on a decent English road, now, where you can ride two abreast, and have a tête-à-tête quite as comfortably as in an ordinary drawing-room! But it’s clearly impossible to propose to a girl when she’s riding a whole horse’s length in front of you on a one-horse pathway. You can’t shout out to her: “My beloved, I adore you,” at the top of your voice, as they do at the opera, especially with her own father—presumably devoted to the rival interest—hanging ahead within moderate earshot.’ So Harry was compelled to repress for the present his ardent declaration, and continue talking to Nora Dupuy about Edward and Marian, a subject which, as he acutely perceived, was more likely to bring them into sympathy with one another than any alternative theme he could possibly have hit upon.
Presently, they descended again upon the plain, and Mr Dupuy was just about to rejoin them in a narrow lane, almost wide enough for three abreast, and bordered by a prickly hedge of cactus and pinguin, when, to Nora’s great surprise, Tom Dupuy, on his celebrated chestnut mare Sambo Gal, came cantering up in the opposite direction, as if on purpose to catch and meet them. Tom wasn’t often to be found away from his canes at that time of day, and Nora had very little doubt indeed that he had caught a glimpse of Harry and herself from Pimento Valley, on the zigzag mountain path, without noticing her father on in front of them, and had ridden out with the express intention of breaking in upon their supposed tête-à-tête.
Mr Dupuy unconsciously prevented him from carrying out this natural design. Meeting his nephew first in the narrow pathway, he was just going to make him turn round and ride alongside with him, when Nora, seized with a sudden fancy, half whispered to Harry Noel: ‘I’m not going to ride with Tom Dupuy; I can’t endure him; I shall turn and ride back in the opposite direction.’
‘We must tell your father,’ Harry said, hesitating.
‘Of course,’ Nora answered decidedly.—‘Papa,’ she continued, raising her voice, ‘we’re going to ride back again and round by Delgado’s hut, you know—the mountain-cabbage palm-tree way is so much prettier, and I want to show it to Mr Noel. You and Tom Dupuy can turn and follow us.—The cob always goes ahead, you see, Mr Noel, if once he’s allowed to get in front of the other horses.’
They turned back once more in this reversed order, Nora and Harry Noel leading the way, and Mr Dupuy, abreast with Tom, following behind somewhat angrily, till they came to a point in the narrow lane where a gap in the hedge led into a patch of jungle on the right-hand side. An old negro had crept out of it just before them, carrying on his head, poised quite evenly, a big fagot of sticks for his outdoor fireplace. The old man kept the middle of the lane, just in front of them, and made not the slightest movement to right or left, as if he had no particular intention of allowing them to pass. Harry had just given his new horse a tap with the whip, and they were trotting along to get well in front of the two followers, so he didn’t greatly relish this untoward obstacle thrown so unexpectedly in his way. ‘Get out of the road, will you, you there!’ he shouted angrily. ‘Don’t you see a lady’s coming? Stand aside this minute, my good fellow, and let her pass, I tell you.’
Delgado turned around, almost as the horse’s nose was upon him, and looking the young man defiantly in the face, answered with an obvious sneer: ‘Who is you, sah, dat you speak to me like-a dat? Dis is de Queen high-road, for naygur an’ for buckra. You doan’t got no right at all to turn me off it.’
Harry recognised his man at once, and the hot temper of the Lincolnshire Noels boiled up within him. He hit out at the fellow with his riding-whip viciously. Delgado didn’t attempt to dodge the blow—a negro never does—but merely turned his head haughtily, so that the bundle of sticks pushed hard against the horse’s nose, and set it bleeding with the force of the sudden turn. Delgado knew it would: the sticks, in fact, were prickly acacia. The horse plunged and reared a little, and backed up in fright against the cactus hedge. The sharp cactus spines and the long aloe-like needles of the pinguin leaves in the hedgerow goaded his flank severely as he backed against them. He gave another plunge, and hit up wildly against Nora’s mount. Nora kept her seat bravely, but with some difficulty. Harry was furious. Forgetting himself entirely, he knocked the bundle of sticks off the old man’s head with a sudden swish of his thick riding-crop, and then proceeded to lay the whip twice or three times about Delgado’s ears with angry vehemence. To his great surprise, Delgado stood, erect and motionless, as if he didn’t even notice the blows. Appeased by what he took to be the man’s submissiveness, Harry dug his heel into his horse’s side and hurried forward to rejoin Nora, who had ridden ahead hastily to avoid the turmoil.
‘He’s an ill-conditioned, rude, bad-blooded fellow, that nigger there,’ he said apologetically to his pretty companion. ‘I know him before. He’s the very same man I told you of the other evening, that wouldn’t pick my whip up for me the first day I came to Trinidad. I’m glad he’s had a taste of it to-day for his continual impudence.’
‘He’ll have you up for assault, you may be sure, Mr Noel,’ Nora answered earnestly. ‘And if Mr Hawthorn tries the case, he’ll give it against you, for he’ll never allow any white man to strike a negro. That man’s name is Delgado; he’s an African, you know—an imported African—and a regular savage; and he had a fearful quarrel once with papa and Tom Dupuy about the wages, which papa has never forgiven. But Mr Hawthorn does say’—and Nora dropped her voice a little—‘that he’s really had a great deal of provocation, and that Tom Dupuy behaved abominably, which of course is very probable, for what can you expect from Tom Dupuy, Mr Noel?—But still’—and this she said very loudly ‘all the negroes themselves will tell you that Louis Delgado’s a regular rattlesnake, and you must put your foot firmly down upon him if you want to crush him.’
‘If you put your foot on rattlesnake,’ Louis Delgado cried aloud from behind, in angry accents, ‘you crush rattlesnake; but rattlesnake sting you, so you die.’ And then he muttered to himself in lower tones: ‘An’ de rattlesnake has got sting in him tail dat will hurt dat mulatto man from Englan’, still, dat tink himself proper buckra.’
Tom Dupuy and his uncle had just reached the spot when Louis Delgado said angrily to himself, in negro soliloquy, this offensive sentence. Tom reined in and looked smilingly at his uncle as Delgado said it. ‘So you know something, too, about this confounded Englishman, you wretched nigger you!’ he said condescendingly. ‘You’ve found out that our friend Noel’s a woolly-headed mulatto, have you, Delgado?’
Louis Delgado’s eyes sparkled with gratified malevolence as he answered with a cunning smile: ‘Aha, Mistah Tom Dupuy, you glad to hear dat, sah! You want to get some information from de poor naygur dis ebenin’, do you! No, no, sah; de Dupuys an’ me, we is not fren’; we is at variance one wit de odder. I doan’t gwine to tell you nuffin’ at all, sah, about de buckra from Englan’. But when mule kick too much, I say to him often: “Ha, ha, me fren’, you is too proud. You tink you is horse. I s’pose you doan’t rightly remember dat your own fader wasn’t nuffin’ but a common jackass!”’
He loved to play with both his intended victims at once, as a cat plays with a captured mouse before she kills it. Keep him in suspense as long as you can—that’s the point of the game. Dandle him, and torture him, and hold him off; but never tell him the truth outright, for good or for evil, as long as you can possibly help it.
‘Do you really know anything,’ Tom Dupuy asked eagerly, ‘or are you only guessing, like all the rest of us? Do you mean to tell me you’ve got any proof that the fellow’s a nigger?—Come, come, Delgado, we may have quarrelled, but you needn’t be nasty about it. I’ve got a grudge against this man Noel, and I don’t mind paying you liberally for anything you can tell me against him.’
But Delgado shook his head doggedly. ‘I doan’t want your money, sah,’ he answered with a slow drawl; ‘I want more dan your money, if I want anyting. But I doan’t gwine to help you agin me own colour. Buckra for buckra, an’ colour for colour! If you want to find out about him, why doan’t you write to de buckra gentlemen over in Barbadoes?’
He kept the pair of white men there, dawdling and parleying, for twenty minutes nearly, while Harry and Nora went riding away alone towards the mountain cabbage-palms. It pleased Delgado thus to be able to hold the two together on the tenter-hooks of suspense—to exercise his power before the two buckras. At last, Tom Dupuy condescended to direct entreaty. ‘Delgado,’ he said with much magnanimity, ‘you know I don’t often ask a favour of a nigger—it ain’t the way with us Dupuys; it don’t run in the family—but still, I ask you as a personal favour to tell me whatever you know about this matter: I have reasons of my own which make me ask you as a personal favour.’
Delgado’s eyes glistened horribly. ‘Buckra,’ he answered with a hideous grin, dropping all the usual polite formulas, ‘I will tell you for true den; I will tell you all about it. Dat man Noel is son ob brown gal from ole Barbadoes. Her name is Budleigh, an’ her fam’ly is brown folks dat lib at place dem call de Wilderness. I hear all about dem from Isaac Pourtalès. Pourtalès an’ dis man Noel, dem is bot’ cousin. De man is brown just same like Isaac Pourtalès!’
‘By George, Uncle Theodore!’ Tom Dupuy cried exultantly, ‘Delgado’s right—right to the letter. Pourtalès is a Barbadoes man: his father was one of the Pourtalèses of this island who settled in Barbadoes, and his mother must have been one of these brown Budleighs. Noel told us himself the other day his mother was a Budleigh—a Budleigh of the Wilderness. He’s been over in Barbadoes looking after their property.—By Jove, Delgado, I’d rather have a piece of news like that than a hundred pounds!—We shall stick a pin, after all, Uncle Theodore, in that confounded, stuck-up, fal-lal mulatto-man.’
‘It’s too late to follow them up by the mountain-cabbages,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy exclaimed with an anxious sigh—how did he know but that at that very moment this undoubted brown man might be proposing (hang his impudence) to his daughter Nora?—‘it’s too late to follow them, if we mean to dress for dinner. We must go home straight by the road, and even then we won’t overtake them before they’re back at Orange Grove, I’m afraid, Tom.’
Delgado stood in the middle of the lane and watched them retreating at an easy canter; then he solemnly replaced the bundle of sticks on the top of his head, spread out his hands and fingers in the most expressively derisive African attitudes, and began to dance with wild glee a sort of imaginary triumphal war-dance over his intended slaughter. ‘Ha, ha,’ he cried aloud, ‘Wednesday ebenin’—Wednesday ebenin’! De great and terrible day ob de Lard comin’ for true on Wednesday ebenin’! Slay, slay, slay, an’ leave not one libbin’ soul behind in de land ob de Amalekites. Dat is de first an’ de last good turn I ebber gwine to do for Tom Dupuy, for certain. I doan’t want his money, I tell him, but I want de blood ob him. On Wednesday night, I gwine to get it. Ha, ha! We gwine to slay de remnant ob de Amalekites.’ He paused a moment, and poised the bundle more evenly on his head; then he went on, walking homewards more quietly, but talking to himself aloud, in a clear, angry, guttural voice, as negroes will do, under the influence of powerful excitement. ‘What for I doan’t tell dat man Noel himself dat he is mulatto when him hit me?’ he asked himself with rhetorical earnestness. ‘Becase I doan’t want to go an’ spoil de fun ob de whole discovery. If I tell him, dat doan’t nuffin’—even before de missy. Tom Dupuy is proper buckra: he hate Noel, an’ Noel hate him! He gwine to tell it so it sting Noel. He gwine to disgrace dat proud man before de buckras an’ before de missy!’
He paused again, and chewed violently for a minute or two at a piece of cane he pulled out of his pocket; then he spat out the dry refuse with a fierce explosion of laughter, and went on again: ‘But I doan’t gwine to punish Noel like I gwine to punish de Dupuys an’ de missy. Noel is fren’ ob Mistah Hawtorn, de fren’ ob de naygur: dat gwine to be imputed to him for righteousness. In de great and terrible day, de angel gwine to pass ober Noel, same as him pass ober de house ob Israel; but de house ob de Dupuy shall perish utterly, like de house ob Pharaoh, an’ like de house ob Saul, king ob Israel, whose seed was destroyed out ob de land, so dat not one ob dem left.’