CHAPTER XXXV.
At the dinner that evening, Macfarlane, the Scotch doctor, took in Nora; while Harry Noel had handed over to his care a dowager-planteress from a neighbouring estate; so Harry had no need to talk any further to his pretty little hostess during that memorable Tuesday. On Wednesday morning he had made up his mind he would find some excuse to get away from this awkward position in Mr Dupuy’s household; for it was clearly impossible for him to remain there any longer, after he had again asked Nora and been rejected; but of course he couldn’t go so suddenly before the dinner to be given in his honour; and he waited on, impatiently and sullenly.
Tom Dupuy was there too; and even Mr Theodore Dupuy himself, who knew the whole secret of Harry’s black blood, and therefore regarded him now as almost beyond the pale of human sympathy, couldn’t help noticing to himself that his nephew Tom really seemed quite unnecessarily anxious to drag this unfortunate young man Noel into some sort of open rupture. ‘Very ill advised of Tom,’ Mr Dupuy thought to himself; ‘and very bad manners too, for a Dupuy of Trinidad. He ought to know well enough that whatever the young man’s undesirable antecedents may happen to be, as long as he’s here in the position of a guest, he ought at least to be treated with common decency and common politeness. To-morrow, we shall manage to hunt up some excuse, or give him some effectual hint, which will have the result of clearing him bodily off the premises. Till then, Tom ought to endeavour to treat him, as far as possible, in every way like a perfect equal.’
Even during the time while the ladies still remained in the dining-room, Tom Dupuy couldn’t avoid making several severe hits, as he considered them, at Harry Noel from the opposite side of the hospitable table. Harry had happened once to venture on some fairly sympathetic commonplace remark to his dowager-planteress about the planters having been quite ruined by emancipation, when Tom Dupuy fell upon him bodily, and called out with an unconcealed sneer: ‘Ruined by emancipation!—ruined by emancipation! That just shows how much you know about the matter, to talk of the planters being ruined by emancipation! If you knew anything at all of what you’re talking about, you’d know that it wasn’t emancipation in the least that ruined us, but your plaguy parliament doing away with the differential duties.’
Harry bit his lip, and glanced across the table at the young planter with a quiet smile of superiority; but the only word he permitted himself to utter was the one harmless and neutral word ‘Indeed!’
‘O yes, you may say “Indeed” if you like,’ Tom Dupuy retorted warmly. ‘That’s just the way of all you conceited English people. You think you know such a precious lot about the whole subject, and you really and truly know in the end just less than absolutely nothing.’
‘Pardon me,’ Harry answered carelessly, with his wine-glass poised for a moment half lifted in his hand. ‘I admit most unreservedly that you know a great deal more than I do about the differential duties, whatever they may be, for I never so much as heard their very name in all my life until the present moment.’
Tom Dupuy smiled a satisfied smile of complete triumph. ‘I thought as much,’ he said exultantly; ‘I knew you hadn’t. That’s just the way of all English people. They know nothing at all about the most important and essential matters, and yet they venture to talk about them for all the world as if they knew as much as we do about the whole subject.’
‘Really,’ Harry answered with a good-humoured smile, ‘I fancied a man might be fairly well informed about things in general, and yet never have heard in his pristine innocence of the differential duties. I haven’t the very faintest idea myself, to tell you the truth, what they are. Perhaps you will be good enough to lighten my darkness.’
‘What they are!’ Tom Dupuy ejaculated in pious horror. ‘They aren’t anything. They’re done away with. They’ve ceased to exist long ago. You and the other plaguy English people took them off, and ruined the colonies; and now you don’t as much as know what you’ve done, or whether they’re existing still or done away with!’
‘Tom, my boy,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy interposed blandly, ‘you really mustn’t hold Mr Noel personally responsible for all the undoubted shortcomings of the English nation! You must remember that his father is, like ourselves, a West Indian proprietor, and that the iniquitous proceedings with reference to the differential duties—which nobody can for a moment pretend to justify—injured him every bit as much as they injured ourselves.’
‘But what are the differential duties?’ Harry whispered to his next neighbour but one, the Scotch doctor. ‘I never heard of them in my life, I assure you, till this very minute.’
‘Well, you know,’ Dr Macfarlane responded slowly, ‘there was a time when sugar from the British colonies was admitted into Britain at a less duty than sugar from Cuba or other foreign possessions; and at last, the British consumer took the tax off the foreign sugar, and cheapened them all alike in the British market. Very good, of course, for the British consumer, but clean ruination and nothing else for the Trinidad planter.’
For the moment, the conversation changed, but not the smouldering war between the two belligerents. Whatever subject Harry Noel happened to start during that unlucky dinner, Tom Dupuy, watching him closely, pounced down upon him at once like an owl on the hover, and tore him to pieces with prompt activity. Harry bore it all as good-naturedly as he could, though his temper was by no means naturally a forbearing one; but he didn’t wish to come to an open rupture with Tom Dupuy at his uncle’s table, especially after that morning’s occurrences.
As soon as the ladies had left the room, however, Tom Dupuy drew up his chair so as exactly to face Harry, and began to pour out for himself in quick succession glass after glass of his uncle’s fiery sherry, which he tossed off with noisy hilarity. The more he drank, the louder his voice became, and the hotter his pursuit of Harry Noel. At last, when Mr Theodore Dupuy, now really alarmed as to what his nephew was going to say next, ordered in the coffee prematurely, to prevent an open outbreak by rejoining the ladies, Tom walked deliberately over to the sideboard and took out a large square decanter, from which he poured a good-sized liqueur-glassful of some pale liquid for himself and another for Harry.
‘There!’ he cried boisterously. ‘Just you try that, Noel, will you. There’s liquor for you! That’s the real old Pimento Valley rum, the best in the island, double distilled, and thirty years in bottle. You don’t taste any hogo about that, Mr Englishman, eh, do you?’
‘Any what?’ Harry inquired politely, lifting up the glass and sipping a little of the contents out of pure courtesy, for neat rum is not in itself a very enticing beverage to any other than West Indian palates.
‘Any hogo,’ Tom Dupuy repeated loudly and insolently—‘hogo, hogo. I suppose, now, you mean to say you don’t even know what hogo is, do you?—Never heard of hogo? Precious affectation! Don’t understand plain language! Yah, rubbish!
‘Why, no, certainly,’ Harry assented as calmly as he was able; ‘I never before did hear of hogo, I assure you. I haven’t the slightest idea what it is, or whether I ought rather to admire or to deplore its supposed absence in this very excellent old rum of yours.’
‘Hogo’s French,’ Tom Dupuy asserted doggedly, ‘Hogo’s French, and I should have thought you ought to have known it. Everybody in Trinidad knows what hogo is. It’s French, I tell you. Didn’t you ever learn any French at the school you went to, Noel?’
‘Excuse me,’ Harry said, flushing up a little, for Tom Dupuy had asked the question very offensively. ‘It is not French. I know enough of French at least to say that such a word as hogo, whatever it may mean, couldn’t possibly be French for anything.’
‘As my nephew pronounces it,’ Mr Dupuy put in diplomatically, ‘you may perhaps have some difficulty in recognising its meaning; but it’s our common West Indian corruption, Mr Noel, of haut goût—haut goût, you understand me—precisely so; haut goût, or hogo, being the strong and somewhat offensive molasses-like flavour of new rum, before it has been mellowed, as this of ours has been, by being kept for years in the wood and in bottle.’
‘Oh, ah, that’s all very well! I suppose you’re going to turn against me now, Uncle Theodore,’ Tom Dupuy exclaimed angrily—he was reaching the incipient stage of quarrelsome drunkenness. ‘I suppose you must go and make fun of me, too, for my French pronunciation as well as this fine-spoken Mr Noel here. But I don’t care a pin about it, or about either of you, either. Who’s Mr Noel, I should like to know, that he should come here, with his fine new-fangled English ways, setting himself up to be better than we are, and teaching us to improve our French pronunciation?—O yes, it’s all very fine; but what does he want to go stopping in our houses for, with our own ladies, and all that, and then going and visiting with coloured rubbish that I wouldn’t touch with a pair of tongs—the woolly-headed niggers!—that’s what I want to know, Uncle Theodore?’
Mr Dupuy and Harry rose together. ‘Tom, Tom!’ Mr Dupuy cried warningly, ‘you are quite forgetting yourself. Remember that this gentleman is my guest, and is here to-day by my invitation. How dare you say such things as that to my own guest, sir, at my own table? You insult me, sir, you insult me!’
‘I think,’ Harry interrupted, white with anger, ‘I had better withdraw at once, Mr Dupuy, before things go any further, from a room where I am evidently, quite without any intention on my own part, a cause of turmoil and disagreement.’
He moved hastily towards the open window which gave upon the lawn, where the ladies were strolling, after the fashion of the country, in the silvery moonlight, among the tropical shrubbery. But Tom Dupuy jumped up before him and stood in his way, now drunk with wine and rum and insolence and temper, and blocked his road to the open window.
‘No, no!’ he cried, ‘you shan’t go yet!—I’ll tell you all the reason why, gentlemen. He shall hear the truth. I’ll take the vanity and nonsense out of him! He’s a brown man himself, nothing but a brown man!—Do you know, you fine fellow you, that you’re only, after all, a confounded woolly-headed brown mulatto? You are, sir! you are, I tell you! Look at your hands, you nigger, look at your hands, I say, if ever you doubt it.’
Harry Noel’s proud lip curled contemptuously as he pushed the half-tipsy planter aside with his elbow, and began to stride angrily away towards the moonlit shrubbery. ‘I daresay I am,’ he answered coolly, for he was always truthful, and it flashed across his mind in the space of a second that Tom Dupuy was very possibly right enough. ‘But if I am, my good fellow, I will no longer inflict my company, I tell you, upon persons who, I see, are evidently so little desirous of sharing it any further.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Tom Dupuy exclaimed madly, planting himself once more like a fool in front of the angry and retreating Englishman, ‘he’s a brown man, a mulatto, a coloured fellow, gentlemen, own cousin of that precious nigger scamp, Isaac Pourtalès, whose woolly head I’d like to knock this minute against his own woolly head, the insolent upstart! Why, gentlemen, do you know who his mother was? Do you know who this fine Lady Noel was that he wants to come over us with? She was nothing better, I swear to you solemnly, than a common brown wench over in Barbadoes!’
Harry Noel’s face grew livid purple with that foul insult, as he leapt like a wild beast at the roaring West Indian, and with one fierce blow sent him reeling backward upon the floor at his feet like a senseless lump of dead matter. ‘Hound and cur! how dare you?’ he hissed out hoarsely, planting his foot contemptuously on the fallen planter’s crumpled shirt-front. ‘How dare you?—how dare you? Say what you will of me, myself, you miserable blackguard—but my mother! my mother!’ And then, suddenly recollecting himself, with a profound bow to the astonished company, he hurried out, hatless and hot, on to the darkling shrubbery, casting the dust of Orange Grove off his feet half instinctively behind him as he went.
Next moment a soft voice sounded low beside him, to his intense astonishment. As he strode alone across the dark lawn, Nora Dupuy, who had seen the whole incident from the neighbouring shrubbery, glided out to his side from the shadow of the star-apple tree and whispered a few words earnestly in his ear. Harry Noel, still white with passion and trembling in every muscle like a hunted animal, could not but stop and listen to them eagerly even in that supreme moment of righteous indignation. ‘Thank you, Mr Noel,’ she said simply—‘thank you, thank you!’