‘No, by Jove, they didn’t,’ Tom Dupuy answered with a sneer, as he walked out into the piazza.—‘What a splendid facer, though, it was, Uncle Theodore, for a confounded upstart nigger of a brown man.—But, I say,’ as they passed out of the piazza and mounted their horses once more by the steps—for they were riding—‘did you ever see anything more disgusting in your life than that woman there—a real white woman, and a born lady, Nora tells me—slobbering over and hugging that great, ugly, hulking, coloured fellow!’
‘He’s white enough to look at,’ Mr Dupuy said reflectively. ‘Poor soul, she married him without knowing anything about it. It’ll be a terrible blow for her, I expect, finding out, now she’s tied to him irrevocably, that he’s nothing more than a common brown man.’
‘She ought to be allowed to get a divorce,’ Tom Dupuy exclaimed warmly. ‘It’s preposterous to think that a born lady, and the daughter of a General Somebody over in England, should be tethered for life to a creature of that sort, whom she’s married under what’s as good as false pretences!’
Meanwhile, the unhappy woman who had thus secured the high prize of Mr Tom Dupuy’s distinguished compassion was sitting on the sofa in the big bare drawing-room, holding her husband’s hand tenderly in hers and soothing him gently by murmuring every now and then in a soft undertone: ‘My darling, how glad we are to know that, after all, it’s nothing, nothing.’
Edward’s stupor lasted for many minutes; not so much because he was deeply hurt or horrified, for there wasn’t much at bottom to horrify him, but simply because he was stunned by the pure novelty and strangeness of that curious situation. A brown man—a brown man! It was too extraordinary! He could hardly awake himself from the one pervading thought that absorbed and possessed for the moment his whole nature. At last, however, he awoke himself slowly. After all, how little it was, compared with their worst fears and anticipations! ‘Thomas,’ he cried to the negro butler, ‘bring round our horses as quick as you can saddle them.—Darling, we must ride up to Agualta this moment, and speak about it all to my father and mother.’
In Trinidad, everybody rides; indeed, there is no other way of getting about from place to place among the mountains, for carriage-roads are there unknown, and only narrow winding horse-paths climb slowly round the interminable peaks and gullies. The Hawthorns’ own house was on the plains just at the foot of the hills; but Agualta and most of the other surrounding houses were up high among the cooler mountains. So the very first thing Marian and Edward had had to do on reaching the island was to provide themselves with a couple of saddle-horses, which they did during their first week’s stay at Agualta. In five minutes the horses were at the door; and Marian, having rapidly slipped on her habit, mounted her pony and proceeded to follow her agitated husband up the slender thread of mountain-road that led tortuously to his father’s house. They rode along in single file, as one always must on these narrow, ledge-like, West Indian bridle-paths, and in perfect silence. At first, indeed, Marian tried to throw out a few casual remarks about the scenery and the tree-ferns, to look as if the disclosure was to her less than nothing—as, indeed, but for Edward’s sake, was actually the case—but her husband was too much wrapped up in his own bitter thoughts to answer her by more than single monosyllables. Not that he spoke unkindly or angrily; on the contrary, his tenderness was profounder than ever, for he knew now to what sort of life he had exposed Marian; but he had no heart just then for talking of any sort; and he felt that until he understood the whole matter more perfectly, words were useless to explain the situation.
As for Marian, one thought mainly possessed her: had even Nora, too, turned against them and forsaken them?
Old Mr Hawthorn met them anxiously on the terrace of Agualta. He saw at once, by their pale and troubled faces, that they now knew at least part of the truth. ‘Well, my boy,’ he said, taking Edward’s hand in his with regretful gentleness, ‘so you have found out the ban that hangs over us?’
‘In part, at least,’ Edward answered, dismounting; and he proceeded to pour forth into his father’s pitying and sympathetic ear the whole story of their stormy interview with the two Dupuys. ‘What can they mean,’ he asked at last, drawing himself up proudly, ‘by calling such people as you and me “brown men,” father?’
The question, as he asked it that moment, in the full sunshine of Agualta Terrace, did indeed seem a very absurd one. Two more perfect specimens of the fair-haired, blue-eyed, pinky-white-skinned Anglo-Saxon type it would have been extremely difficult to discover even in the very heart of England itself, than the father and son who thus faced one another. But old Mr Hawthorn shook his handsome gray old head solemnly and mournfully. ‘It’s quite true, my boy,’ he answered with a painful sigh—‘quite true, every word of it. In the eyes of all Trinidad, of all the West Indies, you and I are in fact coloured people.’