‘Mr Dupuy’s coming round this morning, Mary,’ Mr Hawthorn said to the placid, gentle, old lady in the companion-chair beside him. ‘He wants to look at some oxen I’m going to get rid of, and he thinks, perhaps, he’d like to buy them.’
‘Mr Dupuy!’ Mrs Hawthorn answered, with a slight shudder of displeasure as she spoke. ‘I really wish he wasn’t coming. I can’t bear that man, somehow. He always seems to me the worst embodiment of the bad old days that are dead and gone, Jamie.’
The old gentleman hummed an air to himself reflectively. ‘We mustn’t be too hard upon him, my dear,’ he said after a moment’s pause, in a tone of perfect resignation. ‘They were brought up in a terrible school, those old-time slavery Trinidad folk, and they can’t help bearing the impress of a bad system upon them to the very last moment of their existence. I think so meanly of them for their pride and intolerance, that I take care not to imitate it. You remember what Shelley says: “Let scorn be not repaid with scorn.” That’s how I always feel, Mary, towards Mr Dupuy and all his fellows.’
Mrs Hawthorn bit her lip as she answered slowly: ‘All the same, Jamie, I wish he wasn’t coming here this morning; and this the English mail-day too! We shall get our letter from Edward by-and-by, you know, dear. I hate to have these people coming breaking in upon us the very day we want to be at home by ourselves, to have a quiet hour alone with our dear boy over in England.’
‘Here they come, at anyrate, Mary,’ the old gentleman said, pointing with his hand down the steep ravine to where a couple of men on mountain ponies were slowly toiling up the long zigzag path that climbed the shoulder. ‘Here they come, Theodore Dupuy himself, and that young Tom Dupuy as well, behind him. There’s one comfort, at anyrate, in the position of Agualta—you can never possibly be taken by surprise; you can always see your visitors coming half an hour before they get here.—Run in, dear, and see about having enough for lunch, will you, for Tom Dupuy’s sure to stop until he’s had a glass of our old Madeira.’
‘I dislike Tom Dupuy, I think, even worse than his old uncle, Jamie,’ the bland old lady answered softly in her pleasant voice, exactly as if she was saying that she loved him dearly. ‘He’s a horrid young man, so selfish and narrow-minded; and I hope you won’t ever ask him again to come to Agualta. I can hardly even manage to be decently polite to him.’
The two strangers slowly wound their way up the interminable zigzags that led along the steep shoulders of the Agualta peak, and emerged at last from under the shadow of the green mango grove close beside the grassy terrace in front of the piazza. The elder of the two, Nora’s father, was a jovial, round-faced, close-shaven man, with a copious growth of flowing white hair, that fell in long patriarchal locks around his heavy neck and shoulders; a full-blooded, easy-going, proud face to look at, yet not without a certain touch of gentlemanly culture and old-fashioned courtesy. The younger man, Tom Dupuy, his nephew, looked exactly what he was—a born boor, awkward in gait and lubberly in feature, with a heavy hanging lower jaw, and a pair of sleepy boiled fish eyes, that stared vacantly out in sheepish wonder upon a hopelessly dull and blank creation.
Mr Hawthorn moved courteously to the gate to meet them. ‘It’s a long pull and a steep pull up the hill, Mr Dupuy,’ he said as he shook hands with him. ‘Let me take your pony round to the stables.—Here, Jo!’ to a negro boy who stood showing his white teeth beside the gateway; ‘put up Mr Dupuy’s horse, do you hear, my lad, and Mr Tom’s too, will you?—How are you, Mr Tom? So you’ve come over with your uncle as well, to see this stock I want to sell, have you?’
The elder Dupuy bowed politely as Mr Hawthorn held out his hand, and took it with something of the dignified old West Indian courtesy; he had been to school at Winchester forty years before, and the remote result of that half-forgotten old English training was still plainly visible even now in a certain outer urbanity and suavity of demeanour. But young Tom held out his hand awkwardly like a born boor, and dropped it again snappishly as soon as Mr Hawthorn had taken it, merely answering, in a slow drawling West Indian voice, partly caught from his own negro servants: ‘Yes, I’ve come over to see the stock; we want some oxen. Cane’s good this season; we shall have a capital cutting.’
‘Is the English mail in?’ Mr Hawthorn asked anxiously, as they took their seats in the piazza to rest themselves for a while after their ride, before proceeding to active business. That one solitary fortnightly channel of communication with the outer world assumes an importance in the eyes of remote colonists which can hardly even be comprehended by our bustling, stay-at-home English people.