The mulatto had hardly scratched his own name with shaky pencilled letters on the little card, when Tom Dupuy swaggered up in his awkward, loutish, confident manner, and with a contemptuous nod of condescending half-recognition to the overjoyed mulatto, asked, in his insular West Indian drawl, whether Nora could spare him a couple of dances.
‘Your canes seem to have delayed you too late, Tom Dupuy,’ Nora answered coldly. ‘Dr Whitaker has just asked me for my last vacancy. You should come earlier to a dance, you know, if you want to find a good partner.’
Tom Dupuy stared hard at her face in puzzled astonishment. ‘Your last vacancy!’ he cried incredulously. ‘Dr Whitaker! No more dances to spare, Nora! No, no, I say; this won’t do, you know! You’ve done this on purpose.—Let me have a squint at your programme, will you?’
‘If you don’t choose to take my word for the facts,’ Nora answered haughtily, ‘you can see the names and numbers of my engagements for yourself on my programme.—Dr Whitaker, have the kindness to hand my cousin my programme, if you please.—Thank you.’
Tom Dupuy took the programme ungraciously, and glanced down it with an angry eye. He read every name out aloud till he came to number eleven, ‘Dr Whitaker.’ As he reached that name, his lip curled with an ugly suddenness, and he handed the bit of cardboard back coldly to his defiant cousin. ‘Very well, Miss Nora,’ he answered with a sneer. ‘You’re quite at liberty, of course, to choose your own company however it pleases you. I see your programme’s quite full; but your list of names is rather comprehensive than select, I fancy.—The last name was written down as I was coming towards you. This is a plot to insult me.—Dr Whitaker, we shall settle this little difference elsewhere, probably—with the proper weapon—a horsewhip. Though your ancestors, to be sure, were better accustomed, I believe, sir, to a good raw cowhide.—Good-evening, Miss Nora.—Good-evening, Dr Whitaker.’
The mulatto’s eyes flashed fire, but he replied with a low and stately bow, in suppressed accents: ‘I shall be ready to answer you in this matter whenever you wish, Mr Dupuy—and with your own weapon. Good-evening.’ And he held out his arm quietly to Nora.
Nora rose and took the mulatto’s proffered arm at once with a sweeping air of utter indifference. ‘Shall we take a turn round the gardens, Dr Whitaker?’ she asked calmly, reassuring herself at the same time with a rapid glance that nobody except poor frightened Mrs Pereira had overheard this short altercation.—‘How lovely the moon looks to-night! What an exquisite undertone of green in the long shadows of those columns in the portico!’
‘Undertone of green!’ Tom Dupuy exclaimed aloud in vulgar derision (he was too much of a clod to see that his cue in the scene was fairly past, and that dignity demanded of him now to keep perfectly silent). ‘Undertone of green, indeed, with her precious nigger!—Mrs Pereira, this is your fault! A pretty sort of chaperon you make, upon my word, to let her go and engage herself to sit out a dance with a common mulatto!—Where’s Uncle Theodore? Where is he, I tell you? I shall run and fetch him this very minute. I always said that in the end that girl Nora would go and marry a woolly-headed brown man.’
CHAPTER XXIV.
Nora and the mulatto walked across the garden in unbroken silence, past the fountain in the centre of the courtyard; past the corridor by the open supper-room; past the hanging lanterns on the outer shrubbery; and down the big flight of stone steps to the gravelled Italian terrace that overlooked the deep tropical gully. When they reached the foot of the staircase, Nora said in as unconcerned a tone as she could muster up: ‘Let us walk down here, away from the house, Dr Whitaker. Tom may perhaps send papa out to look for me, and I’d rather not meet him till the next dance is well over. Please take me along the terrace.’