‘But father, dear father,’ Marian said pleadingly, ‘just look at Edward! There isn’t a sign or a mark on him anywhere of anything but the purest English blood! Just look at him, father; how can it be possible?’—and she took up, half unconsciously, his hand—that usual last tell-tale of African descent, but in Edward Hawthorn’s case stainless and white as pure wax. ‘Surely you don’t mean to tell me,’ she said, kissing it with wifely tenderness, ‘there is negro blood—the least, the tiniest fraction, in dear Edward!’
‘Listen to me, dear one,’ the old man said, drawing Marian closer to his side with a fatherly gesture. ‘My father was a white man. Mary’s father was a white man. Our grandfathers on both sides were pure white, and our grandmothers on one side were white also. All our ancestors in the fourth degree were white, save only one—fifteen whites to one coloured out of sixteen quarters—and that one was a mulatto in either line—Mary’s and my great-great-grandmother. In England or any other country of Europe, we should be white—as white as you are. But such external and apparent whiteness isn’t enough by any means for our West Indian prejudices. As long as you have the remotest taint or reminiscence of black blood about you in any way—as long as it can be shown, by tracing your pedigree pitilessly to its fountainhead, that any one of your ancestors was of African origin—then, by all established West Indian reckoning, you are a coloured man, an outcast, a pariah.—You have married a coloured man, Marian; and your children and your grandchildren to the latest generations will all of them for ever be coloured also.’
‘How cruel—how wicked—how abominable!’ Marian cried, flushed and red with sudden indignation. ‘How unjust so to follow the merest shadow or suspicion of negro blood age after age to one’s children’s children!’
‘And how far more unjust still,’ Edward exclaimed with passionate fervour, ‘ever so to judge of any man not by what he is in himself, but by the mere accident of the race or blood from which he is descended!’
Marian flushed again with still deeper colour; she felt in her heart that Edward’s indignation went further than hers, down to the very root and ground of the whole matter.
‘But, O father,’ she began again after a slight pause, clinging passionately both to her husband and to Mr Hawthorn, ‘are they going to visit this crime of birth even on a man of Edward’s character and Edward’s position?’
‘Not on him only,’ the old man whispered with infinite tenderness—‘not on him only, my daughter, my dear daughter—not on him only, but on you—on you, who are one of themselves, an English lady, a true white woman of pure and spotless lineage. You have broken their utmost and sacredest law of race; you have married a coloured man! They will punish you for it cruelly and relentlessly. Though you did it, as he did it, in utter ignorance, they will punish you for it cruelly; and that’s the very bitterest drop in all our bitter cup of ignominy and humiliation.’
There was a moment’s silence, and then Edward cried to him aloud: ‘Father, father, you ought to have told me of this earlier!’
His father drew back at the word as though one had stung him. ‘My boy,’ he answered tremulously, ‘how can you ever reproach me with that? You at least should be the last to reproach me. I sent you to England, and I meant to keep you there. In England, this disgrace would have been nothing—less than nothing. Nobody would ever have known of it, or if they knew of it, minded it in any way. Why should I trouble you with a mere foolish fact of family history utterly unimportant to you over in England? I tried my hardest to prevent you from coming here; I tried to send you back at once when you first came. But do you wonder, now, I shrank from telling you the ban that lies upon all of us here? And do you blame me for trying to spare you the misery I myself and your dear mother have endured without complaining for our whole lifetime?’
‘Father,’ Edward cried again, ‘I was wrong; I was ungrateful. You have done it in all kindness. Forgive me—forgive me!’