CHAPTER XL.
Even as Delgado stood there still on the steps of the piazza at Orange Grove, waving his blood-stained cutlass fiercely about his head, and setting his foot contemptuously on Mr Dupuy’s prostrate and bleeding body, Harry Noel tore up the path that led from Dick Castello’s house at Savannah Garden, and halted suddenly in blank amazement in front of the doorway—Harry Noel, in evening dress, hatless and spurless; just as he had risen in horror from his dinner, and riding his new mare without even a saddle, in his hot haste to see the cause of the unexpected tumult at the Dupuys’ estate. The fierce red glare of the burning cane-houses had roused him unawares at Savannah Garden in the midst of his coffee; and the cries of the negroes and the sound of pistol-shots had cast him into a frantic fever of anxiety for Nora’s safety. ‘The niggers have risen, by Jove!’ Dick Castello cried aloud, as the flames rose higher and higher above the blazing cane-houses. ‘They must be attacking old Dupuy; and if once their blood’s up, you may depend upon it, Noel, they won’t leave him until they’ve fairly murdered him.’
Harry Noel didn’t wait a moment to hear any further conjectures of his host’s on the subject, but darting round to the stables bareheaded, clapped a bit forthwith into his mare’s mouth, jumped on her back just as she stood, in a perfect frenzy of fear and excitement, and tore along the narrow winding road that led by tortuous stretches to Orange Grove as fast as his frightened horse’s legs could possibly carry him.
As he leaped eagerly from his mount to the ground in the midst of all that hideous din and uproar and mingled confusion, Delgado was just calling on his fellow-blacks to follow him boldly into the house and to ‘kill de missy;’ and the Orange Grove negroes, cowed and terrified now that their master had fallen bodily before them, were beginning to drop back, trembling, into the rooms behind, and allow the frantic and triumphant rioters to have their own way unmolested. In a moment, Harry took in the full terror of the scene—saw Mr Dupuy’s body lying, a mass of hacked and bleeding wounds, upon the wooden floor of the front piazza; saw the infuriated negroes pressing on eagerly with their cutlasses lifted aloft, now fairly drunk with the first taste of buckra blood; and Delgado in front of them all, leaping wildly, and gesticulating in frantic rage with arms and hands and fingers, as he drove back the terrified servants through the heavy old mahogany doorway of the great drawing-room into the room that opened out behind toward Nora’s own little sacred boudoir.
Harry had no weapon of any sort with him except the frail riding-whip he carried in his hand; but without waiting for a second, without thinking for one instant of the surrounding danger, he rushed up the piazza steps, pushed the astonished rioters to right and left with his powerful arms, jumped over the senseless planter’s prostrate body, swept past Delgado into the narrow doorway, and there stood confronting the savage ringleader boldly, his little riding-whip raised high above his proud head with a fierce and threatening angry gesture. ‘Stop there!’ he cried, in a voice of stern command, that even in that supreme moment of passion and triumph had its full effect upon the enraged negroes. ‘Stop there, you mean-spirited villains and murderers! Not a step further—not a step further, I tell you! Cowards, cowards, every one of you, to kill a poor old man like that upon his own staircase, and to threaten a helpless innocent lady.’
As he spoke, he laid his hand heavily upon Louis Delgado’s bony shoulder, and pushed the old negro steadily backward, out of the doorway and through the piazza, to the front steps, where Mr Dupuy’s body was still lying untended and bleeding profusely. ‘Stand back, Delgado!’ he cried out fiercely and authoritatively. ‘Stand back this minute, and put down your cutlass! If you want to fight the whites, you cowardly scoundrels you, why don’t you fight the men like yourselves, openly and straightforward, instead of coming by night, without note or warning, burning and hacking and killing and destroying, and waging war against defenceless old men and women and children?’
The negroes fell back a little grudgingly, as he spoke, and answered him only by the loud and deep guttural cry—an inarticulate, horribly inhuman gurgle—which is their sole possible form of speech in the very paroxysm of African passion. Louis Delgado held his cutlass half doubtfully in his uplifted hand: he had tasted blood once now; he had laid himself open to the fierce vengeance of the English law; he was sorely tempted in the whirlwind of the moment to cut down Harry Noel too, as he had cut down the white-headed old planter the minute before. But the innate respect of the essentially fighting negro for a resolute opponent held him back deliberating for a moment; and he drew down his cutlass as quickly as he had raised it, divided in mind whether to strike or to permit a parley.
Noel seized the occasion with intuitive strategy. ‘Here you, my friends,’ he cried boldly, turning round towards the cowering Orange Grove servants—‘is this the way you defend your master? Pick him up, some of you—pick him up this minute, I tell you, and lay him out decently on the sofa over yonder.—There, there; don’t be afraid. Not one of these confounded rogues and cowards dares to touch you or come one pace nearer you as long as you’re doing it. If he does! cutlass or no cutlass, I’ll break this riding-whip to pieces, I tell you, across his black head as soon as look at him.’ And he brandished the whip angrily in front of him, towards the mad and howling group of angry rioters, held at bay for the moment on the piazza steps by that solitary, undismayed, young Englishman with his one frail and ridiculous weapon.
The rioters howled all the louder at his words, and leaped and grinned and chattered and gesticulated like wild beasts behind an iron railing; but not one of them ventured to be the first in aiming a blow with his deadly implement at Harry Noel. They only yelled once more incomprehensibly in their deep gutturals, and made hideous wild grimaces, and waved their cutlasses frantically around them with horrible inarticulate negro imprecations.
But Harry stood there firm and unyielding, facing the maddened crowd with his imperious manner, and overawing them in spite of themselves with that strange power of a superior race over the inferior in such critical moments of intense passion.
The Orange Grove servants, having fresh courage put into their failing breasts once more by the inspiring presence of a white man at their sides, and being true at heart to their poor master, as negro house-servants always are and always have been in the worst extremities, took advantage of the momentary lull in the storm to do as Harry told them, and lift Mr Dupuy’s body up from the ground, laying it carefully on the piazza sofa. ‘That’s better,’ Harry said, as they finished their task.—‘Now, we must go on and drive away these murderous rascals. If we don’t drive them away, my good friends, they’ll kill Miss Nora—they’ll kill Miss Nora. Would you have it said of you that you let a parcel of murderous plantation rioters kill your own dead master’s daughter right before your very faces?’
As he spoke, he saw a pale face, pale, not with fear, but with terrible anger, standing mutely and immovably beside him; and next moment he heard Nora Dupuy’s voice crying out deeply, in the very echo of his own angry words: ‘Cowards, cowards!’
At the sight of the hated Dupuy features, the frenzied plantation hands seemed to work themselves up into a fresh access of ungovernable fury. With indescribable writhings and mouthings and grimaces, their hatred and vengeance found articulate voice for a moment at least, and they cried aloud like one man: ‘Kill her—kill her! Kill de missy! Kill her—kill her!’
‘Give me a pistol,’ Harry Noel exclaimed wildly to the friendly negroes close behind his back: ‘a gun—a knife—a cutlass—anything!’
‘We got nuffin, sah,’ Uncle ’Zekiel answered, blankly and whiningly, now helpless as a child before the sudden inundation of armed rioters, for without his master he could do nothing.
Harry looked around him desperately for a moment, then, advancing a step with hasty premeditation, he wrenched a cutlass suddenly by an unexpected snatch from one of the foremost batch of rioters, and stepped back with it once more unhurt, as if by miracle, into the narrow pass of the mahogany doorway.
‘Stand away, Miss Dupuy!’ he cried to her earnestly. ‘If you value your life, stand back, I beg of you. This is no place for you to-night. Run, run! If you don’t escape, there’ll be more murder done presently.’
‘I shall not go,’ Nora answered, clenching her fist hard and knitting her brow sternly, ‘as long as one of these abominable wretches dares to stop without permission upon my father’s piazza.’
‘Then stand away, you there!’ Harry shouted aloud to the surging mob; ‘stand away this moment, every one of you! Whoever steps one single step nearer this lady behind me, that step shall be his last.’
Delgado stood still and hesitated once more, with strange irresolution—he didn’t like to hit the brown man—but Isaac Pourtalès, lifting his cutlass wildly above his head, took a step in front and brought it down with a fierce swish towards Harry’s skull, in spite of kinship. Harry parried it dexterously with his own cutlass, like a man who has learned what fencing means; and then, rushing, mad with rage, at the astonished Isaac before he knew what to look for, brought down a heavy blow upon his right shoulder, that disabled his opponent forthwith, and made him drop at once his useless weapon idly by his side. ‘Take that, you nigger dog!’ Harry hissed out fiercely through his close-set teeth; ‘and if any other confounded nigger among you all dares to take a single step nearer in the same direction, he’ll get as much and more, too, than this insolent fellow here has got for his trouble.’
The contemptuous phrase once more roused all the negroes’ anger. ‘Who you call nigger, den?’ they cried out fiercely, leaping in a body like wild beasts upon him. ‘Kill him—kill him! Him doan’t fit to lib. Kill him—kill him, dis minute—kill him!’
But Delgado, some strange element of compassion for the remote blood of his own race still rising up instinctively and mysteriously within him, held back the two or three foremost among the pressing mass with his sinewy arm. ‘No, no, me fren’s,’ he shouted angrily, ‘doan’t kill him, doan’t kill him. Tiger no eat tiger, ole-time folk say; tiger no eat tiger. Him is nigger himself. Him is Isaac Pourtalès’ own cousin.—Doan’t kill him. His mudder doan’t nobody, I tell you, me fren’s, but coloured gal, de same as yours is—coloured gal from ole Barbadoes. I sayin’ to you, me fren’s, ole-time folk has true proverb, tiger no eat tiger.’
The sea of angry black faces swelled up and down wildly and dubiously for a moment, and then, with the sudden fitful changefulness of negro emotion, two or three voices, the women’s especially, called aloud, with sobs and shrieks: ‘Doan’t kill him!—doan’t kill him! Him me brudder—him me brudder. Doan’t kill him! Hallelujah!’
Harry looked at them savagely, with knit brows and firm-set teeth, his cutlass poised ready to strike in one hand, and his whole attitude that of a forlorn-hope at bay against overwhelming and irresistible numbers.
‘You black devils!’ he cried out fiercely, flinging the words in their faces, as it were, with a concentrated power of insult and hatred, ‘I won’t owe my life to that shameful plea. Perhaps I may have a drop or two of your black blood flowing somewhere in my veins, and perhaps I mayn’t; but whether I have or whether I haven’t, I wouldn’t for dear life itself acknowledge kindred with such a pack of cowardly vagabonds and murderers as you, who would hack an old man brutally to death like that, before his own daughter’s face, upon his own staircase.’
‘Mr Noel,’ Nora echoed, in a clear defiant tone, nothing trembling, from close behind him, ‘that was well said—that was bravely spoken! Let them come on and kill us if they will, the wretches. We’re not afraid of them, we’re not afraid of them.’
‘Miss Dupuy,’ Harry cried earnestly, looking back towards her with a face of eager entreaty, ‘save yourself! for God’s sake, save yourself. There’s still time even now to escape—by the garden-gate—to Hawthorn’s—while these wretches here are busy murdering me.’
At the word, Louis Delgado sprang forward once more, cutlass in hand, no longer undecided, and with one blow on the top of the head felled Harry Noel heavily to the ground.
Nora shrieked, and fell fainting to the ground.
‘Him doan’t dead yet,’ Delgado yelled aloud in devilish exultation, lifting his cutlass again with savage persistence. ‘Hack him to pieces, dar—hack him to pieces! Him doan’t dead yet, I tellin’ you, me fren’s. Hack him to pieces! An’ when him dead, we gwine to carry him an’ de missy an’ Massa Dupuy out behind dar, an’ burn dem all in a pile togedder on de hot ashes ob de smokin’ cane-house!’