CHAPTER XLIV.
Next morning, Tom Dupuy, Esquire, of Pimento Valley, Westmoreland, Trinidad, mounted his celebrated chestnut pony Sambo Gal at his own door, unchained his famous Cuban bloodhound Slot from his big kennel, and rode up, with cousinly and lover-like anxiety, to Orange Grove, to inquire after Nora’s and her father’s safety. Nora was up by the time he reached the house, pale and tired, and with a frightful headache; but she went to meet him at the front door, and dropped him a very low old-fashioned obeisance.
‘Good-morning, Tom Dupuy!’ she said coldly. ‘So you’ve come at last to look us up, have you? It’s very good of you, I’m sure, very good of you. They tell me you didn’t come last night, when half the gentlemen from all the country round rode up in hot haste with guns and pistols to take care of papa and me. But it’s very good of you, to be sure, now the danger’s well over, to come round in such a friendly fashion and drop us a card of kind inquiries.’
Even Tom Dupuy, born boor and fool as he was, flushed up crimson at that galling taunt from a woman’s lips, ‘Now that the danger’s well over.’ To do him justice, Tom Dupuy was indeed no coward; that was the one solitary vice of which no fighting Dupuy that ever lived could with justice be suspected for a moment. He would have faced and fought a thousand black rioters single-handed, like a thousand fiends, himself, in defence of his beloved vacuum pans and dearly cherished saccharometers and boiling-houses. His devotion to molasses would no doubt have been proof against the very utmost terrors of death itself. But the truth is that exact devotion in question was the real cause of his apparent remissness on the previous evening. All night long, Tom Dupuy had been busy rousing and arming his immediate house-servants, despatching messengers to Port-of-Spain for the aid of the constabulary, and preparing to defend the cut canes with the very last drop of his blood and the very last breath in his stolid body. At the first sight of the conflagration at Orange Grove, he guessed at once that ‘the niggers had risen;’ and he proceeded without a moment’s delay to fortify roughly Pimento Valley against the chance of a similar attack. Now that he came to look back calmly upon his heroic exertions, however, it did begin to strike him somewhat forcibly that he had perhaps shown himself slightly wanting in the affection of a cousin and the ardour of a lover. He bit his lip awkwardly for a second, with a sheepish look; then he glanced up suddenly and said with clumsy self-vindication: ‘It isn’t always those that deserve the best of you that get the best praise or thanks, in this world of ours, I fancy, Nora!’
‘I fail to understand you,’ Nora answered with quiet dignity.
‘Why, just you look here, Nora: it’s somehow like this, I tell you plainly. Here was I last night down at Pimento. I saw by the blaze that these nigger fellows must have broken loose, and must be burning down the Orange Grove cane-houses; so there I stopped all night long, working away as hard as I could work—no nigger could have worked harder—trying to protect your father’s canes and the vacuum pans from these murdering, howling rebels. And now, when I come round here this morning to tell you, after having made sure the whole year’s crop at old Pimento, one of your fine English flouts is all the thanks I get from you, miss, for my night’s labour.’
Nora laughed—laughed in spite of herself—laughed aloud a simple, merry, girlish laugh of pure amusement—it was so comical. There they had all stood last night in imminent danger of their lives, and of what is dearer than life itself, surrounded by a frantic, yelling mob of half-demented, rum-maddened negroes—her father left for dead upon the piazza steps, Harry Noel hacked with cutlasses before her very eyes, herself trampled under foot in her swoon upon the drawing-room floor by the naked soles of those negro rioters—and now this morning, Cousin Tom comes up quietly when all was over to tell her at his ease how he had taken the most approved precautions for the protection of his beloved vacuum pans. Every time she thought of it, Nora laughed again, with a fresh little outburst of merry laughter, more and more vehemently, just as though her father were not at that very moment lying within between life and death, as still and motionless as a corpse, in his own bedroom.
There is nothing more fatal to the possible prospects of a suitor, however hopeless, than to be openly laughed at by the lady of his choice at a critical moment—nothing more galling to a man under any circumstances than patent ridicule from a beautiful woman. Tom Dupuy grew redder and redder every minute, and stammered and stuttered in helpless speechlessness; and still Nora looked at him and laughed, ‘for all the world,’ he thought to himself, ‘as if I were just nobody else but the clown at the theatre.’
But that was not indeed the stage on which Tom Dupuy really performed the part of clown with such distinguished success in his unconscious personation.
‘How’s your father this morning?’ he asked at last gruffly, with an uneasy shuffle. ‘I hear the niggers cut him about awfully last night, and next door to killed him with their beastly cutlasses.’
Nora drew herself up and checked her untimely laughter with a sudden sense of the demands of the situation, as she answered once more in her coldest tone: ‘My father is getting on as well as we can expect, thank you, Mr Tom Dupuy. We are much obliged to you for your kind inquiries. He slept the night pretty well, all things considered, and is partially conscious again this morning. He was very nearly killed last night, as you say; and if it hadn’t been for Mr Noel and Mr Hawthorn, who kindly came up at once and tried to protect us, he would have been killed outright, and I with him. But Mr Noel and Mr Hawthorn had happily no vacuum pans and no trash-houses to engage their first and chief attention.’
Tom Dupuy sneered visibly. ‘Hm!’ he said. ‘Two coloured fellows! Upon my conscience! the Dupuys of Trinidad must be coming down in the world, it seems, when they have to rely for help in a nigger rising upon two coloured fellows.’
‘If they’d had to rely upon white men like you,’ Nora answered angrily, flushing crimson as she spoke, ‘they’d have been burnt last night upon the ashes of the cane-house, and not a soul would have stirred a hand or foot to save them or protect them.’
Tom laughed to himself a sharp, short, malicious laugh. ‘Ha, ha!’ he said, ‘my fine English-bred lady, so that’s the way the wind blows, is it? I may be a fool, and I know you think me one’—Nora bowed immediately a sarcastic acquiescence—‘but I’m not such a fool as not to see through a woman’s face into a woman’s mind like an open window. I heard that that woolly-headed Hawthorn man had been over here and made a most cowardly time-serving speech to the confounded niggers, giving way to all their preposterous demands in the most outrageous and ridiculous fashion; but I didn’t hear that the other coloured fellow—your fine-spoken English friend Noel’—he hissed the words out with all the concentrated strength of his impotent hatred—‘had been up here too, to put his own finger into the pie when the crust was burning. Just like his impudence! the conceited coxcomb!’
‘Mr Noel is lying inside, in our own house here, this very moment, dangerously wounded,’ Nora cried, her face now like a crimson peony; ‘and he was cut down by the negroes last night, standing up bravely, alone and single-handed, with no weapon but a little riding-whip, facing those mad rebels like an angry tiger, and trying to protect me from their insults and their cutlasses; while you, sir, were stopping snugly away down at Pimento Valley, looking carefully after your canes and your vacuum pans. Tom Dupuy, if you dare to say another word, now or ever, in my hearing against the man who tried to save my life from those wild wretches at the risk of his own, as sure as I’m standing here, sir, I give you fair notice I’ll chastise you myself, as soon as I’ll look at you, you cowardly backbiter!—And now, Mr Dupuy, good-morning.’
Tom saw the game was fairly up and his hand outwitted. It was no use arguing with her any longer. ‘When she’s in this humour,’ he said to himself philosophically, ‘you might as well try to reason with a wounded lioness.’ So he whistled carelessly for Slot to fellow, lifted his hat as politely as he was able—he didn’t pretend to all these fine new-fangled town-bred ways of Harry Noel’s—jumped with awkward agility upon his chestnut pony, turned its head in the direction of Pimento Valley, and delivered a parting Parthian shot from a safe distance, just as he got beyond the garden gateway. ‘Good-by, Miss Nora,’ he said then savagely, raising his hat a second time with sarcastic courtesy: ‘good-bye for ever. This is our last meeting. And remember that I always said you’d finish in the end, for all your fine English education, in marrying a confounded woolly-headed brown man!’