Mr Dupuy’s brow clouded over still more evidently. ‘Not to fall in with it!’ he cried excitedly, tossing off the remainder of his Madeira—‘not to fall in with it!—Why, Mr Hawthorn, what do you mean, sir? Of course, if her father bids her, she’ll fall in with it immediately. If she doesn’t—why, then, sir, I’ll just simply have to make her. She shall marry Tom Dupuy the minute I order her to. She should marry a one-eyed man with a wooden leg if her father commanded it. She shall do whatever I tell her. I’ll stand no refusing and shilly-shallying. Let me tell you, sir, if there’s a vice that I hate and detest, it’s the vice of obstinacy. But I’ll stand no obstinacy.’
‘No obstinacy in those about you,’ Mr Hawthorn put in suggestively.
‘No, sir, no—not in those about me. Other people, of course, I can’t be answerable for, though I’d like to flog every obstinate fellow I come across, just to cure him of his confounded temper. O no, sir; I can’t endure obstinacy—in man or beast, I can’t endure it.’
‘So it would seem,’ Mr Hawthorn replied drily. ‘I hope sincerely, Miss Dupuy will find the choice you have made for her a suitable and satisfactory one.’
‘Suitable, sir! Why, of course it’s suitable; and as to satisfactory, well, if I say she’s got to take him, she’ll have to be satisfied with him, willy-nilly.’
‘But she won’t!’ Tom Dupuy interrupted sullenly, flicking his boot with his short riding-whip in a vicious fashion. ‘She won’t, you may take my word for it, Uncle Theodore. I can’t imagine why it is; but these young women who’ve been educated in England, they’ll never be satisfied with a planter for a husband. They think a gentleman and a son of gentlemen for fifty generations isn’t a good enough match for such fine ladies as themselves; and they go running off after some of these red-coated military fellows down in the garrison over yonder, many of whom, to my certain knowledge, Mr Hawthorn, are nothing more than the sons of tradesmen across there in England. I’ll bet you a sovereign, Uncle Theodore, that Nora’ll refuse to so much as look at the heir of Pimento Valley, the minute she sees him.’
‘But why do you think so, Mr Tom,’ their host put in, ‘before the young lady has even landed on the island?’
‘Ah, I know well enough,’ Tom Dupuy answered, with a curious leer of unintelligent cunning. ‘I know the ways and the habits of the women. They go away over there to England; they get themselves crammed with French and German, and music and drawing, and all kinds of unnecessary accomplishments. They pick up a lot of nonsensical new-fangled notions about Am I not a Man and a Brother? and all that kind of humbug. They think an awful lot of themselves because they can play and sing and gabble Italian. And they despise us West Indians, gentlemen and planters, because we can’t parley-voo all their precious foreign lingoes, and don’t know as much as they do about who composed Yankee Doodle. I know them—I know them; I know their ways and their manners. Culture they call it. I call it a precious lot of trumpery nonsense. Why, Mr Hawthorn, I assure you I’ve known some of these fine new-fangled English-taught young women who’d sooner talk to a coloured doctor, as black as a common nigger almost, just because he’d been educated at Oxford, or Edinburgh, or somewhere, than to me myself, the tenth Dupuy in lineal succession at Pimento Valley.’
‘Indeed,’ Mr Hawthorn answered innocently—no other alternative phrase committing him, as he thought, to so small an opinion on the merits of the question.—‘But do you know, Mr Tom, I don’t believe any person of the Dupuy blood is very likely to take up with these strange modern English heresies that so much surprise you.’
‘Quite true, sir,’ Mr Dupuy the elder answered with prompt self-satisfaction, mistaking his host’s delicate tone of covert satire for the voice of hearty concurrence and full approval. ‘You’re quite right there, Mr Hawthorn, I’m certain. No born Dupuy of Orange Grove would ever be taken in by any of that silly clap-trap humanitarian rubbish. No foolish Exeter Hall nonsense pertains to the fighting Dupuys, sir, I can assure you—root and branch, not a single ounce of it. It isn’t in them, Mr Hawthorn—it isn’t in them.’