CHAPTER XXXII.
‘This is awkward, Tom, awfully awkward,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy said to his nephew as they rode homeward. ‘We must manage somehow to get rid of this man as early as possible. Of course, we can’t keep him in the house any longer with your cousin Nora, now that we know he’s really nothing more—baronet or no baronet—than a common mulatto. But at the same time, you see, we can’t get rid of him anyhow by any possibility before the dinner to-morrow evening. I’ve asked several of the best people in Trinidad especially to meet him, and I don’t want to go and stultify myself openly before the eyes of the whole island. What the dickens can we do about it?’
‘If you’d taken my advice, Uncle Theodore,’ Tom Dupuy answered sullenly, in spite of his triumph, ‘you’d have got rid of him long ago. As it is, you’ll have to keep him on now till after Tuesday, and then we must manage somehow to dismiss him politely.’
They rode on without another word till they reached the house; there, they found Nora and Harry had arrived before them, and had gone in to dress for dinner. Mr Dupuy followed their example; but Tom, who had made up his mind suddenly to stop, loitered about on the lawn under the big star-apple tree, waiting in the cool till the young Englishman should make his appearance.
Meanwhile, Nora, in her own dressing-room, attended by Rosina Fleming and Aunt Clemmy, was thinking over the afternoon’s ride very much to her own satisfaction. Mr Noel was really after all a very nice fellow: if he hadn’t been so dreadfully dark—but there, he was really just one shade too dusky in the face ever to please a West Indian fancy. And yet, he was certainly very much in love with her! The very persistence with which he avoided reopening the subject, while he went on paying her such very marked attention, showed in itself how thoroughly in earnest he was. ‘He’ll propose to me again to-morrow—I’m quite sure he will,’ Nora thought to herself, as Rosina fastened up her hair with a sprig of plumbago and a little delicate spray of wild maiden-hair. ‘He was almost going to propose to me as we came along by the mountain-cabbages this afternoon, only I saw him hesitating, and I turned the current of the conversation. I wonder why I turned it? I’m sure I don’t know why. I wonder whether it was because I didn’t know whether I should answer “Yes” or “No,” if he were really to ask me? I think one ought to decide in one’s own mind beforehand what one’s going to say in such a case, especially when a man has asked one already. He’s awfully nice. I wish he was just a shade or two lighter. I believe Tom really fancies—he’s so dark—it isn’t quite right with him.’
Isaac Pourtalès, lounging about that minute, watching for Rosina, whom he had come to talk with, saw Nora flit for a second past the open window of the passage, in her light and gauze-like evening dress, with open neck in front, and the flowers twined in her pretty hair; and he said to himself as he glanced up at her: ‘De word ob de Lard say right, “Take captive de women!”’
At the same moment, Tom Dupuy, strolling idly on the lawn in the thickening twilight, caught sight of Pourtalès, and beckoned him towards him with an imperious finger. ‘Come here,’ he said; ‘I want to talk with you, you nigger there.—You’re Isaac Pourtalès, aren’t you?—I thought so. Then come and tell me all you know about this confounded cousin of yours—this man Noel.’
Isaac Pourtalès, nothing loth, poured forth at once in Tom Dupuy’s listening ear the whole story, so far as he knew it, of Lady Noel’s antecedents in Barbadoes. While the two men, the white and the brown, were still conversing under the shade of the star-apple tree, Nora, who had come down to the drawing-room meanwhile, strolled out for a minute, beguiled by the cool air, on to the smoothly kept lawn in front of the drawing-room window. Tom saw her, and beckoned her to him with his finger, exactly as he had beckoned the tall mulatto. Nora gazed at the beckoning hand with the intensest disdain, and then turned away, as if perfectly unconscious of his ungainly gesture, to examine the tuberoses and great bell-shaped brugmansias of the garden border.
Tom walked up to her angrily and rudely. ‘Didn’t you see me calling you, miss?’ he said in his harsh drawl, with no pretence of unnecessary politeness. ‘Didn’t you see I wanted to speak to you?’
‘I saw you making signs to somebody with your hand, as if you took me for a servant,’ Nora answered coldly; ‘and not having been accustomed in England to be called in that way, I thought you must have made a mistake as to whom you were dealing with.’
Tom started and muttered an ugly oath. ‘In England,’ he repeated. ‘Oh, ah, in England. West Indian gentlemen, it seems, aren’t good enough for you, miss, since this fellow Noel has come out to make up to you. I suppose you don’t happen to know that he’s a West Indian too, and a precious queer sort of one into the bargain? I know you mean to marry him, miss; but all I can tell you is, your father and I are not going to permit it.’
‘I don’t wish to marry him,’ Nora answered, flushing fiery red all over (‘Him is pretty for true when him blush like dat,’ Isaac Pourtalès said to himself from the shade of the star-apple tree). ‘But if I did, I wouldn’t listen to anything you might choose to say against him, Tom Dupuy; so that’s plain speaking enough for you.’
Tom sneered. ‘O no,’ he said; ‘I always knew you’d end by marrying a woolly-headed mulatto; and this man’s one, I don’t mind telling you. He’s a brown man born; his mother, though she is Lady Noel—fine sort of a Lady, indeed—is nothing better than a Barbadoes brown girl; and he’s own cousin to Isaac Pourtalès over yonder! He is, I swear to you.—Isaac, come here, sir!’
Nora gave a little suppressed scream of surprise and horror as the tall mulatto, in his ragged shirt, leering horribly, emerged unexpectedly, like a black spectre, from the shadows opposite.
‘Isaac,’ the young planter said with a malicious smile, ‘who is this young man, I want to know, that calls himself Mister Noel?’
Isaac Pourtalès touched his slouching hat awkwardly as he answered, under his breath, with an ugly scowl: ‘Him me own cousin, sah, an’ me mudder cousin. Him an’ me mudder is fam’ly long ago in ole Barbadoes.’
‘There you are, Nora!’ Tom Dupuy cried out to her triumphantly. ‘You see what sort of person your fine English friend has turned out to be.’
‘Tom Dupuy,’ Nora cried in her wrath—but in her own heart she knew it wasn’t true—‘if you tell me this, trying to set me against Mr Noel, you’ve failed in your purpose, sir: what you say has no effect upon me. I do not care for him; you are quite mistaken about that; but if I did, I don’t mind telling you, your wicked scheming would only make me like him all the better. Tom Dupuy, no real gentleman would ever try so to undermine another man’s position.’
At that moment, Harry Noel, just descending to the drawing-room, strolled out to meet them on the lawn, quite unconscious of this little family altercation. Nora glanced hastily from Tom Dupuy, in his planter coat and high riding-boots, to Harry Noel, looking so tall and handsome in his evening dress, and couldn’t help noticing in her own mind which of the two was the truest gentleman. ‘Mr Noel,’ she said, accepting his half-proffered arm with a natural and instinctively gracious movement, ‘will you take me in to dinner? I see it’s ready.’
Tom Dupuy, crest-fallen and astonished, followed after, and muttered to himself with deeper conviction than ever that he always knew that girl Nora would end in the longrun by marrying a confounded woolly-headed mulatto.
(To be continued.)