They had reached the top of the stone steps, when two voices were borne upon them from the two ends of the corridor opposite. The first was Mr Dupuy’s. ‘Where is she?’ it said.—‘Mrs Pereira, where’s Nora? You don’t mean to say this is true that Tom tells me—that you’ve actually gone and let her sit out a dance with that conceited nigger fellow, Dr Whitaker? Upon my word, my dear madam, what this island is coming to nowadays is really more than I can imagine.’
The second voice was a louder and blander one. ‘My son, my son,’ it said, in somewhat thick accents, ‘my dear son, Wilberforce Clarkson Whitaker! Where is he? Is he in de garden? I want to introduce him to de governor’s lady. De governor’s lady has been graciously pleased to express an interes in de inheritor of de tree names most closely bound up wit de great social revolution, in which I have had de honour to be de chief actor, for de benefit of millions of my fellow-subjecks.—Walkin’ in de garden, is he, wit de daughter of my respected friend, de Honourable Teodore Dupuy of Orange Garden? Ha, ha! Dat’s de way wit de young dogs—dat’s de way wit dem! Always off walkin’ in de garden wit de pretty ladies. Ha, ha, ha! I doan’t blame dem!’
Dr Whitaker, his face on fire and his ears tingling, pushed on rapidly down the very centre of the garden, taking no heed of either voice in outward seeming, but going straight on, with Nora on his arm, till he reached the open window-doors that led directly into the big ballroom. There, seething in soul, but outwardly calm and polite, he handed over his partner with a conventional smile to Captain Castello, and turning on his heel, strode away bitterly across the ballroom to the outer doorway. Not a few people noticed him as he strode off in his angry dignity, for Tom Dupuy had already been blustering—with his usual taste—in the corridors and refreshment room about his valiant threat of soundly horsewhipping the woolly-headed mulatto. In the vestibule, the doctor paused and asked for his dust-coat. A negro servant, in red livery, grinning with delight at what he thought the brown man’s discomfiture, held it up for him to put his arms into. Dr Whitaker noticed the fellow’s malevolent grin, and making an ineffectual effort to push his left arm down the right arm sleeve, seized the coat angrily in his hand, doubled it up in a loose fold over his elbow, and then, changing his mind, as an angry man will do, flung it down again with a hasty gesture upon the hall table. ‘Never mind the coat,’ he said fiercely. ‘Bring round my horse! Do you hear, fellow? My horse, my horse! This minute, I tell you!’
The red-liveried servant called to an invisible negro outside, who soon returned with the doctor’s mountain pony.
‘Better take de coat, sah,’ the man in livery said with a sarcastic guffaw. ‘Him help to proteck your back an’ sides from Mistah Dupuy, him horsewhip!’
Dr Whitaker leapt upon his horse, and turned to the man with a face livid and distorted with irrepressible anger. ‘You black scoundrel, you!’ he cried passionately, using the words of reproach that even a mulatto will hurl in his wrath at his still darker brother, ‘do you think I’m running away from Tom Dupuy’s miserable horsewhip? I’m not afraid of a hundred fighting Dupuys and all their horsewhips.—You black image, you! how dare you speak to me? How dare you?—how dare you?’ And he cut out at him viciously in impotent rage with the little riding-whip he held in his fingers.
The negro laughed again, a loud hoarse laugh, and flung both his hands up with open fingers in African derision. Dr Whitaker dug his spurless heel deep into his horse’s side, sitting there wildly in his evening dress, and turned his head in mad despair out towards the outer darkness. The moon was still shining brightly overhead, but by contrast with the lights in the gaily illuminated ballroom, the path beneath the bamboo clumps in the shrubbery looked very gloomy, dark, and sombre.
Two or three of the younger men, anxious to see whether Tom Dupuy would get up ‘a scene’ then and there, crowded out hastily to the doorway, to watch the nigger fellow ride away for his life for fear of a horsewhipping. As they stood in the doorway, peering into the darkness after the retreating upright figure, there came all at once, with appalling suddenness, a solitary vivid flash of lightning, such as one never sees outside the tropics, illuminating with its awful light the whole length of the gardens and the gully beneath them. At the same second, a terrific clap of thunder seemed to burst, like innumerable volleys of the heaviest artillery, right above the roof of the governor’s bungalow. It was ghastly in its suddenness and in its strength. No one could say where the lightning struck, for it seemed to have struck on every side at once: all that they saw was a single sheet of all-pervading fire, in whose midst the mulatto and his horse stood silhouetted out in solid black, a statuesque group of living sculpture, against the brilliant fiery background. The horse was rearing, erect on his hind-legs; and Dr Whitaker was reining him in and patting his neck soothingly with hand half lifted. So instantaneous was the flash, indeed, that no motion or change of any sort was visible in the figures. The horse looked like a horse of bronze, poised in the air on solid metal legs, and merely simulating the action of rearing.
For a minute or two, not a soul spoke a word, or broke in any way the deathless silence that succeeded that awful and unexpected outburst. The band had ceased playing as if by instinct, and every person in the whole ballroom stood still and looked one at another with mute amazement. Then, by a common impulse, they pressed all out slowly together, and gazed forth with wondering eyes upon the serene moonlight. The stars were shining brightly overhead: the clap had broken from an absolutely clear sky. Only to northward, on the very summits of the highest mountains, a gathering of deep black clouds rolled slowly onward, and threatened to pass across the intervening valley. Through the profound silence, the ring of Dr Whitaker’s horse’s hoofs could be heard distinctly down below upon the solid floor of the mountain pathway.
‘Who has left already?’ the governor asked anxiously of the negro servants.