CHAPTER XLII.
Marian was behind in the dining-room and bedrooms with Aunt Clemmy, helping to nurse and tend the sick and wounded as well as she could, in the midst of so much turmoil and danger. When she and Edward had been roused by the sudden glare of the burning cane-houses, reddening the horizon by Orange Grove, and casting weird and fitful shadows from all the mango-trees in front of their little tangled garden, she had been afraid to remain behind alone at Mulberry, and had preferred facing the maddened rioters by her husband’s side, to stopping by herself under such circumstances among the unfamiliar black servants in her own house. So they had ridden across hurriedly to the Dupuys’ together, especially as Marian was no less timid on Nora’s account than on her own; and when they reached the little garden gate that led in by the back path, she had slipped up alone, unperceived by the mob, while Edward went round openly to the front door and tried to appease the angry negroes.
The shouts and yells when she first arrived had proved indeed very frightening and distracting; but after a time, she could guess, from the comparative silence which ensued, that Edward had succeeded in gaining a hearing: and then she and Aunt Clemmy turned with fast beating hearts to look after the bleeding victims, one of whom at least they gave up from the first as quite dead beyond the reach of hope or recovery.
Nora was naturally the first to come to. She had fainted only; and though, in the crush and press, she had been trampled upon and very roughly handled by the barefooted negroes, she had got off, thanks to their shoeless condition, with little worse than a few ugly cuts and bruises. They laid her tenderly on her own bed, and bathed her brows over and over again with Cologne water; till, after a few minutes, she sat up again, pale and deathly to look at, but proud and haughty and defiant as ever, with her eyes burning very brightly, and an angry quiver playing unchecked about her bloodless lips.
‘Is he dead?’ she asked calmly—as calmly as if it were the most ordinary question on earth, but yet with a curious tone of suppressed emotion, that even in that terrible moment did not wholly escape Marian’s quick womanly observation.
‘Your father?’ Marian answered, in a low voice.—‘Dear, dear, you mustn’t excite yourself now. You must be quite quiet, perfectly quiet. You’re not well enough to stand any talking or excitement yet. You must wait to hear about it all, darling, until you’re a little better.’
Nora’s lip curled a trifle as she answered almost disdainfully: ‘I’m not going to lie here and let myself be made an invalid of, while those murderers are out yonder still on the piazza. Let me get up and see what has happened.—No; I didn’t mean papa, Marian; I know he’s dead; I saw him lying hacked all to pieces outside on the sofa. I meant Mr Noel. Have they killed him? Have they killed him? He’s a brave man. Have the wretches killed him?’
‘We think not,’ Marian answered dubiously. ‘He’s in the next room, and two of the servants are there taking care of him.’
Nora rose from the bed with a sudden bound, and stood, pale and white, all trembling before them. ‘What are you stopping here wasting your care upon me for, then?’ she asked half angrily. ‘You think not—think not, indeed! Is this a time to be thinking and hesitating! Why are you looking after women who go into fainting-fits, like fools, at the wrong moment? I’m ashamed of myself, almost, for giving way visibly before the wretches—for letting them see I was half afraid of them. But I wasn’t afraid of them for myself, though—not a bit of it, Marian: it was only for—for Mr Noel.’ She said it after a moment’s brief hesitation, but without the faintest touch of girlish timidity or ill-timed reserve. Then she swept queen-like past Marian and Aunt Clemmy, in her white dinner dress—the same dress that she had worn when she was Marian’s bridesmaid—and walked quickly but composedly, as if nothing had happened, into the next bedroom.
The two negresses had already taken off Harry’s coat and waistcoat, and laid him on the bed with his shirt front all saturated with blood, and his forehead still bleeding violently, in spite of their unskilful efforts to stanch it with a wet towel. When Nora entered, he was lying there, stretched out at full length, speechless and senseless, the blood even then oozing slowly, by intermittent gurgling throbs, from the open gash across his right temple. There was another deeper and even worse wound gurgling similarly upon his left elbow.
‘They should have been here,’ Nora cried; ‘Marian and Clemmy should have been here, instead of looking after me in yonder.—Is he dead, Nita, is he dead? Tell me!’
‘No, missy,’ the girl answered, passively handing her the soaked towel. ‘Him doan’t dead yet; but him dyin’, him dyin’. De blood comin’ out ob him, spurt, spurt, spurt, so him can’t lib long, not anyway. Him bledded to death already, I tinkin’, a’most.’
Nora looked at the white face, and a few tears began at last to form slowly in her brimming eyelids. But she brushed them away quickly, before they had time to trickle down her blanched cheek, for her proud West Indian blood was up now, as much as the negroes’ had been a few minutes earlier; and she twisted her handkerchief round a pocket pencil so as to form a hasty extemporised tourniquet, which she fastened bravely and resolutely with intuitive skill above the open wound on the left elbow. She had no idea that the little jets in which the blood spurted out so rhythmically were indicative of that most dangerous wound, a severed artery; but she felt instinctively, somehow, that this was the right thing to do, and she did it without flinching, as if she had been used to dealing familiarly with dangerous wounds for half her lifetime. Then she twisted the hasty instrument tightly round till the artery was securely stopped, and the little jets ceased entirely at each pulsation of the now feeble and weakened heart.
‘Run for the doctor, somebody!’ she cried eagerly; ‘run for the doctor, or he’ll die outright before we can get help for him!’
But Nita and Rose, on their knees beside the wounded man, only cowered closer to the bedside, and shook with terror as another cry rose on a sudden from outside from the excited negroes. It was the cry they raised when they found Delgado was really struck dead before their very eyes by the visible and immediate judgment of the Almighty.
Nora looked down at them with profound contempt, and merely said, in her resolute, scornful voice: ‘What! afraid even of your own people? Why, I’m not afraid of them; I, who am a white woman, and whom they’d murder now and hack to pieces, as soon as they’d look at me, if once they could catch me, when their blood’s up!—Marian, Marian! you’re a white woman; will you come with me?’
Marian trembled a little—she wasn’t upheld through that terrible scene by the ingrained hereditary pride of a superior race before the blind wrath of the inferior, bequeathed to Nora by her slave-owning ancestors; but she answered with hardly a moment’s hesitation: ‘Yes, Nora. If you wish it, I’ll go with you.’
There is something in these conflicts of race with race which raises the women of the higher blood for the time being into something braver and stronger than women. In England, Marian would never have dared to go out alone in the face of such a raging tumultuous mob, even of white people; but in Trinidad, under the influence of that terrible excitement, she found heart to put on her hat once more, and step forth with Nora under the profound shade of the spreading mango-trees, now hardly lighted up at all at fitful intervals by the dying glow from the burnt-out embers of the smoking cane-houses. They went down groping their way by the garden path, and came out at last upon the main bridle-road at the foot of the garden. There Marian drew back Nora timidly with a hand placed in quick warning upon her white shoulder. ‘Stand aside, dear,’ she whispered at her ear, pulling her back hastily within the garden gate and under the dark shadow of the big star-apple tree. ‘They’re coming down—they’re coming down! I hear them, I hear them! O God, O God, I shouldn’t have come away! They’ve killed Edward! My darling, my darling! They’ve killed him—they’ve killed him!’
‘I wouldn’t stand aside for myself,’ Nora answered half aloud, her eyes flashing proudly even in the shadowy gloom of the garden. ‘But to save Mr Noel’s life, to save his life, I’ll stand aside if you wish, Marian.’
As they drew back into the dark shadow, even Nora trembling and shivering a little at the tramp of so many naked feet, some of the negroes passed close beside them outside the fence on their way down from the piazza, where they had just been electrified into sudden quietness by the awful sight of Louis Delgado’s dead body. They were talking earnestly and low among themselves, not, as before, shrieking and yelling and gesticulating wildly, but conversing half below their breath in a solemn, mysterious, awe-struck fashion.
‘De Lard be praise for Mr Hawtorn!’ one of them said as he passed unseen close beside them. ‘Him de black man fren’. We got nobody like him. I no’ would hurt Mr Hawtorn, de blessed man, not for de life ob me.’
Marian’s heart beat fast within her, but she said never a word, and only pressed Nora’s hand, which she held convulsively within her own, harder and tighter than ever, in her mute suspense and agony.
Presently another group passed close by, and another voice said tremulously: ‘Louis Delgado dead—Louis Delgado dead! Mr Hawtorn is wonderful man for true! Who’d have tought it, me brudder, who’d have tought it?’
‘That’s Martin Luther,’ Nora cried almost aloud, unable any longer to restrain her curiosity. ‘I know him by his voice. He wouldn’t hurt me.—Martin, Martin! what’s that you’re saying? Has Mr Hawthorn shot Delgado?’ As she spoke, with a fierce anticipatory triumph in her voice, she stepped out from the shadow of the gate on to the main bridle-path, in her white dress and with her pale face, clearly visible under the faint moonlight.
Martin flung up his arms like one stabbed to the heart, and shouted wildly: ‘De missy, de missy! Dem done killed her on de piazza yonder, and her duppy comin’ now already to scare us and trouble us!’
Even in that moment of awe and alarm, Nora laughed a little laugh of haughty contempt for the strong, big-built, hulking negro’s superstitious terror. ‘Martin!’ she cried, darting after him quickly, as he ran away awe-struck, and catching him by the shoulder with her light but palpable human grasp, ‘don’t you know me? I’m no duppy. It’s me myself, Missy Nora, calling you. Here, feel my hand; you see I’m alive still; you see your people haven’t killed me yet, even if you’ve killed your poor old master.—Martin, tell me, what’s this you’re all saying about Mr Hawthorn having shot Delgado?’
Martin, shaking violently in every limb, turned round and reassured himself slowly that it was really Nora and not her ghost that stood bodily before him. ‘Ha, missy,’ he answered good-humouredly, showing his great row of big white teeth, though still quaking visibly with terror, ‘don’t you be ’fraid; we wouldn’t hurt you, not a man of us. But it doan’t Mr Hawtorn dat shot Delgado! It God Almighty! De Lard hab smitten him!’
‘What!’ Nora cried in surprise. ‘He fell dead! Apoplexy or something, I suppose. The old villain! he deserved it, Martin.—And Mr Hawthorn? How about Mr Hawthorn? Have they hurt him? Have they killed him?’
‘Mr Hawtorn up to de house, missy, an’ all de niggers pray de Lard for true him lib for ebber, de blessed creature.’
‘Why are you all coming away now, then?’ Nora asked anxiously. ‘Where are you going to?’
‘Mr Hawtorn send us home,’ Martin answered submissively; ‘an’ we all ’fraid, if we doan’t go straight when him tell us, we drop down dead wit Kora, Datan, an’ Abiram, an’ lyin’ Ananias, same like Delgado.’
‘Marian,’ Nora said decisively, ‘go back to your husband. You ought to be with him.—Martin, you come along with me, sir. Mr Noel’s dying. You’ve killed him, you people, as you’ve killed my father. I’ve got to go and fetch the doctor now to save him; and you’ve got to come with me and take care of me.’
‘Oh, darling,’ Marian interrupted nervously, ‘you mustn’t go alone amongst all these angry, excited negroes with nobody but him. Don’t, don’t; I’ll gladly go with you!’
‘Do as I tell you!’ Nora cried in a tone of authority, with a firm stamp of her petulant little foot. ‘You ought to be with him. You mustn’t leave him.—That’s right, dear.—Now, then, Martin!’
‘I ’fraid, missy.’
‘Afraid! Nonsense. You’re a pack of cowards. Am I afraid? and I’m a woman! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Come along with me at once, and do as I tell you.’
The terrified negro yielded grudgingly, and crept after her in the true crouching African fashion, compelled against his will to follow implicitly the mere bidding of the stronger and more imperious nature.
They wound down the zigzag path together, under the gaunt shadows of the overhanging bamboo clumps, waving weirdly to and fro with the breeze in the feeble moonlight—the strong man slouching along timorously, shaking and starting with terror at every rustle of Nora’s dress against the bracken and the tree ferns; the slight girl erect and fearless, walking a pace or two in front of her faint-hearted escort with proud self-reliance, and never pausing for a single second to cast a cautious glance to right or left among the tangled brushwood. The lights were now burning dimly in all the neighbouring negro cottages; and far away down in the distance, the long rows of gas lamps at Port-of-Spain gleamed double with elongated oblique reflections in the calm water of the sleepy harbour.
They had got half-way down the lonely gully without meeting or passing a single soul, when, at a turn of the road where the bridle-path swept aside to avoid a rainy-season torrent, a horse came quickly upon them from in front, and the rapid click of a cocked pistol warned Nora of approaching danger.
‘Who goes there?’ cried a sharp voice with a marked Scotch accent from the gloom before her. ‘Stop this minute, or I’ll fire at you, you nigger!’
With a thrill of delight, Nora recognised the longed-for voice—the very one she was seeking. It was Dr Macfarlane, from beyond the gully, roused, like half the island, by the red glare from the Orange Grove cane-houses, and spurring up as fast as his horse could carry him, armed and on the alert, to the scene of the supposed insurrection.
‘Don’t shoot,’ Nora answered coolly, holding her hand up in deprecation. ‘A friend!—It’s me, Dr Macfarlane—Nora Dupuy, coming to meet you.’
‘Miss Dupuy!’ the doctor cried in astonishment. ‘Then they’ll not have shot you, at anyrate, young leddy! But what are you doing out here alone at this time of night, I’m wondering? Have you had to run for your life from Orange Grove from these cowardly insurgent nigger fellows?’
‘Run from them!’ Nora echoed contemptuously. ‘Dr Macfarlane, I’d like to see it. No, no; I’m too much of a Dupuy ever to do that, I promise you, doctor. They can murder me, but they can’t frighten me. I was coming down to look for you, for poor Mr Noel, who’s lying dangerously wounded up at our house, with a wound on the arm and a terrible cut across the temple.’
‘Coming alone—just in the very midst of all this business—to fetch me to look after a wounded fellow!’ the doctor ejaculated half to himself, with mingled astonishment and admiration. He jumped down from his horse with a quick movement, not ungallantly, and lifted Nora up in his big arms without a word, seating her sideways, before she could remonstrate, on the awkward saddle. ‘Sit you there, Miss Dupuy,’ he said kindly. ‘You’re a brave lass, if ever there was one. I’ll hold his head, and run alongside with you. We’ll be up at the house again in ten minutes.’
‘They’ve killed my father,’ Nora said simply, beginning to break down at last, after her unnatural exaltation of bravery and endurance, and bursting into a sudden flood of tears. ‘He’s lying at home all hacked to pieces with their dreadful cutlasses; and Mr Noel’s almost dead too; perhaps he’ll be quite dead, doctor, before we can get there.’
(To be continued.)