CHAPTER XLI.
Before the yelling mob could close again round Harry Noel’s fallen body, with their wild onslaught of upraised cutlasses, more dangerous to one another in the thick press than to the prostrate Englishman or to poor fainting and unconscious Nora, another hasty clatter of horse’s hoofs burst upon them from behind, up the hilly pathway, and a loud, clear, commanding voice called out in resonant tones that overtopped and stilled for a moment the tumultuous murmur of negro shrieks: ‘In the Queen’s name—in the Queen’s name, hold; disperse there!’
That familiar adjuration acted like magic on the fierce and half-naked throng of ignorant and superstitious plantation negroes. It was indeed to them a mighty word to conjure with, that loud challenge in the name of the great distant Queen, whose reality seemed as far away from them and as utterly removed from their little sphere as heaven itself. They dropped their cutlasses instantly, for a brief moment of doubt and hesitation; a few voices still shouted fiercely, ‘Kill him—kill him!’ and then a unanimous cry arose among all the surging mass of wild and scowling black humanity: ‘Mr Hawtorn, Mr Hawtorn! Him come in Missis Queen name, so gib us warnin’. Now us gwine to get justice. Mr Hawtorn, Mr Hawtorn!’
But while the creole-born plantation hands thus welcomed eagerly what they looked upon, in their simplicity, as the Queen’s direct mouthpiece and representative, Louis Delgado, his face distorted with rage, and his arms plying his cutlass desperately, frowned and gnashed his teeth more fiercely than ever with rage and disappointment; for his wild African passion was now fully aroused, and like the tiger that has once tasted blood, he would not be balked of the final vengeful delight of hacking his helpless victim slowly to pieces in a long-drawn torture. ‘Missis Queen!’ he cried contemptuously, turning round and brandishing his cutlass with savage joy once more before the eyes of his half-sobered companions—‘Missis Queen, him say dar! Ha, ha, what him say dat for? What de Queen to me, I want you tell me? I doan’t care for Queen, or judge, or magistrate, or nuffin! I gwine to kill all de white men togedder, in all Trinidad, de Lard helpin’ me!’
As he spoke, Edward Hawthorn jumped hastily from his saddle, and advanced with long strides towards the fiercely gesticulating and mumbling African. The plantation negroes, cowed and tamed for the moment by Edward’s bold and resolute presence, and overawed by the great name of that mysterious, unknown, half-mythical Queen Victoria, beyond the vast illimitable ocean, fell back sullenly to right and left, and made a little lane through the middle of the crowd for the Queen’s representative to mount the staircase. Edward strode up, without casting a single glance on either side, to where Delgado stood savagely beside Harry Noel’s fallen body, and put his right hand with an air of indisputable authority upon the frantic African’s uplifted arm. Delgado tried to shake him off suddenly with a quick, adroit, convulsive movement; but Edward’s grip was tight and vice-like, and he held the black arm powerless in his grasp, as he spoke aloud a few words in some unknown language, which sounded to the group of wondering negroes like utter gibberish—or perhaps some strange spell with which the representative of Queen Victoria knew how to conjure by some still more potent and terrible obeah than even Delgado’s.
But Louis Delgado alone knew that the words were Arabic, and that Edward Hawthorn grasped his arm: ‘In the name of Allah, the All-wise, the most Powerful!’
At the sound of that mighty spell, a powerful one, indeed, to the fierce, old, half-christianised Mohammedan, Delgado’s arm dropped powerless to his trembling side, and he fell back, gnashing his teeth like a bulldog balked of a fight, into the general mass of plantation negroes. There he stood, dazed and stunned apparently, leaning up sulkily against the piazza post, but speaking not a word to either party for good or for evil.
The lull was but for a minute; and Edward Hawthorn saw at once that if he was to gain any permanent advantage by the momentary change of feeling in the fickle negro mob, he must keep their attention distracted for a while, till their savage passions had time to cool a little, and the effect of this unwonted orgy of fire and bloodshed had passed away before the influence of sober reflection. A negro crowd is like a single creature of impulse—swayed to and fro a hundred times more easily than even a European mob by every momentary passing wave of anger or of feeling.
‘Take up Mr Noel and Miss Dupuy,’ he said aside in his cool commanding tone to the Orange Grove servants:—‘Mr Noel isn’t dead—I see him breathing yet—and lay them on a bed and look after them, while I speak to these angry people.’ Then he turned, mastering himself with an effort for that terrible crisis, and taking a chair from the piazza, he mounted it quickly, and began to speak in a loud voice, unbroken by a single tremor of fear, like one addressing a public meeting, to the great sea of wondering, upturned black faces, lighted up from behind in lurid gleams by the red glare of the still blazing cane-houses.
‘My friends,’ he said, holding his hand before him, palm outward, in a mute appeal for silence and a fair hearing, ‘listen to me for a moment. I want to speak to you; I want to help you to what you yourselves are blindly seeking. I am here to-night as Queen Victoria’s delegate and representative. Queen Victoria has your welfare and interest at heart; and she has sent me out to this island to do equal justice between black man and white man, and to see that no one oppresses another by force or fraud, by lawlessness or cunning. As you all know, I am in part a man of your own blood; and Queen Victoria, in sending me out to judge between you, and in appointing so many of your own race to posts of honour here in Trinidad, has shown her wish to favour no one particular class or colour to the detriment or humiliation of the others. But in doing as I see you have done to-night—in burning down factories, in attacking houses, in killing or trying to kill your own employers, and helpless women, and men who have done no crime against you except trying to protect your victims from your cruel vengeance—in doing this, my friends, you have not done wisely. That is not the way to get what you want from Queen Victoria.—What is it you want? Tell me that. That is the first thing. If it is anything reasonable, the Queen will grant it. What do you want from Queen Victoria?’
With one voice the whole crowd of lurid upturned black faces answered loudly and earnestly: ‘Justice, justice!’
Edward paused a moment, with rhetorical skill, and looked down at the mob of shouting lips with a face half of sternness and half of benevolence. ‘My friends,’ he said again, ‘you shall have justice. You haven’t always had it in the past—that I know and regret; but you shall have it, trust me, henceforth in the future. Listen to me. I know you have often suffered injustice. Your rights have not been always respected, and your feelings have many times been ruthlessly trampled upon. Nobody sympathises with you more fully than I do. But just because I sympathise with you so greatly, I feel it my duty to warn you most earnestly against acting any longer as you have been acting this evening. I am your friend—you know I am your friend. From me, I trust, you have never had anything less than equal justice.’
‘Dat’s true—dat’s true!’ rang in a murmuring wave of assent from the eager listening crowd of negroes.
‘Well,’ Edward went on, lowering his tone to more persuasive accents, ‘be advised by me, then, and if you want to get what you ask from Queen Victoria, do as I tell you. Disperse to-night quietly and separately. Don’t go off in a body together and talk with one another excitedly around your watch-fires about your wrongs and your grievances. Burn no more factories and cane-houses. Attack no more helpless men and innocent women. Think no more of your rights for the present. But go each man to his own hut, and wait to see what Queen Victoria will do for you.—If you continue foolishly to burn and riot, shall I tell you in plain words what will happen to you? The governor will be obliged to bring out the soldiers and the volunteers against you; they will call upon you, as I call upon you now, in the Queen’s name, to lay down your pistols and your guns and your cutlasses; and if you don’t lay them down at once, they will fire upon you, and disperse you easily. Don’t be deceived. Don’t believe that because you are more numerous—because there are so many more of you than of the white men—you could conquer them and kill them by main force, if it ever came to open fighting. The soldiers, with their regular drill and their good arms and their constant training, could shoot you all down with the greatest ease, in spite of your numbers and your pistols and your cutlasses. I don’t say this to frighten you or to threaten you; I say it as your friend, because I don’t want you foolishly to expose yourselves to such a terrible butchery and slaughter.’
A murmur went through the crowd once more, and they looked dubiously and inquiringly toward Louis Delgado. But the African gave no sign and made no answer; he merely stood sullenly still by the post against which he was leaning; so Edward hastened to reassure the undecided mob of listening negroes by turning quickly to the other side of the moot question.
‘Now, listen again,’ he said, ‘for what I’m going to say to you now is very important. If you will disperse, and go each to his own home, without any further trouble or riot, I will undertake, myself, to go to England on purpose for you, and tell Queen Victoria herself about all your troubles. I will tell her that you haven’t always been justly treated, and I’ll try to get new and better laws made in future for you, under which you may secure more justice than you sometimes get under present arrangements. Do you understand me? If you go home at once, I promise to go across the sea and speak to Queen Victoria herself on your behalf, over in England.’
The view of British constitutional procedure implied in Edward Hawthorn’s words was not perhaps strictly accurate; but his negro hearers would hardly have felt so much impressed if he had offered to lay their grievances boldly at the foot of that impersonal entity, the Colonial Office; while the idea that they were to have a direct spokesman, partly of their own blood, with the Queen herself, flattered their simple African susceptibilities and helped to cool their savage anger. Like children as they are, they began to smile and show their great white teeth in infantile satisfaction, as pleasantly as though they had never dreamt ten minutes earlier of hacking Harry Noel’s body fiercely into little pieces; and more than one voice cried out in hearty tones: ‘Hoorrah for Mr Hawtorn! Him de black man fren’. Gib him a cheer, boys! Him gwine to ’peak for us to Queen Victoria!’
‘Then promise me faithfully,’ Edward said, holding out his hand once more before him, ‘that you’ll all go home this very minute and settle down quietly in your own houses.’
‘We promise, sah,’ a dozen voices answered eagerly.
Edward Hawthorn turned anxiously for a moment to Louis Delgado. ‘My brother,’ he said to him rapidly in Arabic, ‘this is your doing. You must help me now to quiet the people you have first so fiercely and so foolishly excited. Assist me in dispersing them, and I will try to lighten for you the punishment which will surely be inflicted upon you as ringleader, when this is all over.’
But Delgado, propped in a stony attitude against the great wooden post of the piazza, answered still never a word. He stood there to all appearance in stolid and sullen indifference to all that was passing so vividly around him, with his white and bloodshot eyes staring vacantly into the blank darkness that stretched in front of him, behind the flickering light of the now collapsed and burnt-out cane-houses.
Edward touched him lightly on his bare arm. To his utter horror and amazement, though not cold, it was soft and corpse-like, as in the first hour of death, before rigidity and chilliness have begun to set in. He looked up into the bloodshot eyes. Their staring balls seemed already glazed and vacuous, utterly vacant of the fierce flashing light that had gleamed from the pupils so awfully and savagely but ten minutes before, as he brandished his cutlass with frantic yells above Harry Noel’s fallen body. Two of the plantation negroes, attracted by Edward’s evident recoil of horror, came forward with curiosity, flinging down their cutlasses, and touched the soft cheeks, not with the reverent touch which a white man feels always due to the sacredness of death, but harshly and rudely, as one might any day touch a senseless piece of stone or timber.
Edward looked at them with a pallid face of mute inquiry. The youngest of the two negroes drew back for a second, overtaken apparently by a superstitious fear, and murmured low in an awe-struck voice: ‘Him dead, sah, dead—stone dead. Dead dis ten minute, since ever you begin to ’peak to de people, sah.’
He was indeed. His suppressed rage at the partial failure of his deeply cherished scheme of vengeance on the hated white men, coming so close upon his paroxysm of triumph over the senseless bodies of Mr Dupuy and Harry Noel, had brought about a sudden fit of cardiac apoplexy. The old African’s savage heart had burst outright with conflicting emotions. Leaning back upon the pillar for support, as he felt the blood failing within him, he had died suddenly and unobserved without a word or a cry, and had stood there still, as men will often stand under similar circumstances, propped up against the supporting pillar, in the exact attitude in which death had first overtaken him. In the very crisis of his victory and his defeat, he had been called away suddenly to answer for his conduct before a higher tribunal than the one with which Edward Hawthorn had so gently and forbearingly threatened him.
The effect of this sudden catastrophe upon the impressionable minds of the excited negroes was indeed immediate and overwhelming. Lifting up their voices in loud wails and keening, as at their midnight wakes, they cried tremulously one after another: ‘De Lard is against us—de Lard is against us! Ebbery man to your tents, O Israel! De Lard hab killed Delgado—hab killed Delgado—hab smitten him down, for de murder him committed!’ To their unquestioning antique faith, it was the visible judgment of heaven against their insurrection, the blood of Theodore Dupuy and Harry Noel crying out for vengeance from the floor of the piazza, like the blood of righteous Abel long before, crying out for vengeance from the soil of Eden.
More than one of them believed in his heart, too, that the mysterious words in the unknown language which Edward Hawthorn had muttered over the old African were the spell that had brought down upon him before their very eyes the unseen bolt of the invisible powers. Whether it were obeah, or whether it were imprecation and solemn prayer to the God of heaven, they thought within themselves, in their dim, inarticulate, unspoken fashion, that ‘Mr Hawtorn word bring down de judgment dat very minute on Louis Delgado.’
In an incredibly short space of time, the great crowd of black faces had melted away as quickly as it came, and Edward Hawthorn was left alone in the piazza, with none but the terrified servants of the Orange Grove household to help him in his task or to listen to his orders. All that night long, across the dark gorge and the black mango grove, they could hear the terrified voices of the negroes in their huts singing hymns, and crying aloud in strange prayers to God in heaven that the guilt of this murder might not be visited upon their heads, as it had been visited before their very eyes that night on Louis Delgado. To the negro mind, the verdict of fate is the verdict of heaven.
‘Take up his body, too, and lay it down on the sofa,’ Edward said to Uncle ’Zekiel, still beside himself with terror at the manifold horrors of this tragical evening.
‘I doan’t can dare, sah,’ Uncle ’Zekiel answered tremulously—‘I doan’t can dare lay me hand upon de corpse, I tellin’ you, sah. De finger ob de Lard has smite Delgado. I doan’t dare to lift an’ carry him.’
‘One of you boys, then, come and help me,’ Edward cried, holding up the corpse with one hand to keep it from falling.
But not one of them dared move a single step nearer to the terrible awe-inspiring object.
At last, finding that no help was forthcoming on any hand, Edward lifted up the ghastly burden all by himself in his own arms, and laid it down reverently and gently on the piazza sofa. ‘It is better so,’ he murmured to himself slowly and pitifully. ‘There will be no more blood on either side shed at anyrate for this awful evening’s sorry business.’
And then at length he had leisure to turn back into the house itself and make inquiries after Mr Dupuy and Harry and Nora.