In tropical countries, people are accustomed to hurricanes and thunderstorms and landslips and sudden death in every form—does not the Church service even contain that weirdly suggestive additional clause among the petitions of the litany, ‘From earthquake, tempest, and violent commotion, good Lord, deliver us?’—and so nobody ever tried to dig up Wilberforce Whitaker’s buried body; and if they had tried, they would never have succeeded in the attempt, for a thousand tons of broken fragments lay on top of it, and crushed it to atoms beneath them. Poor old Bobby felt the loss acutely, after his childish fashion, for nearly a fortnight, and then straightway proceeded to make love as usual to Miss Seraphina and the other ladies, and soon forgot his whole trouble in that one congenial lifelong occupation.
Nora Dupuy did not so quickly recover the shock that the mulatto’s sudden and almost supernatural death had given her system. It was many weeks before she began to feel like herself again, or to trust herself in a room alone for more than a very few minutes together. Born West Indian as she was, and therefore superstitious, she almost feared that Dr Whitaker’s ghost would come to plead his cause with her once more, as he himself had pleaded with her that last unhappy evening on the Italian terrace. It wasn’t her fault, to be sure, that she had been the unwitting cause of his death; and yet in her own heart she felt to herself almost as if she had deliberately and intentionally killed him. That insuperable barrier of race that had stood so effectually in his way while he was still alive was partly removed now that she could no longer see him in person; and more than once, Nora found herself in her own room with tears standing in both her eyes for the poor mulatto she could never possibly or conceivably have married.
As for Tom Dupuy, he couldn’t understand such delicate shades and undertones of feeling as those which came so naturally to Nora; and he had therefore a short and easy explanation of his own for his lively little cousin’s altered demeanour. ‘Nora was in love with that infernal nigger fellow,’ he said confidently over and over again to his uncle Theodore. ‘You take my word for it, she was head over ears in love with him; that’s about the size of it. And that evening when she behaved so disgracefully with him on the terrace at the governor’s, he proposed to her, and she accepted him, as sure as gospel. If I hadn’t threatened him with a good sound horsewhipping, and driven him away from the house in a deuce of a funk, so that he went off with his tail between his legs, and broke his neck over a precipice in that terrible thunderstorm—you mark my words, Uncle Theodore—she’d have gone off, as I always said she would, and she’d have ended by marrying a woolly-headed brown man.’
Mr Theodore Dupuy, for his part, considered that even to mention the bare possibility of such a disgrace within the bosom of the family was an insult to the pure blood of the Dupuys that his nephew Tom ought to have been the last man on earth to dream of perpetrating.
Time rolled on, however, month after month, and gradually Nora began to recover something of her natural gaiety. Even deep impressions last a comparatively short time with bright young girls; and before six months more had fairly rolled by, Nora was again the same gay, light, merry, dancing little thing that she had always been, in England or in Trinidad.
One morning, about twelve months after Nora’s first arrival in the island, the English mail brought a letter for her father, which he read with evident satisfaction, and then handed it contentedly to Nora across the breakfast-table. Nora recognised the crest and monogram in a moment with a faint flutter: she had seen them once before, a year ago, in England. They were Harry Noel’s. But the postmark was Barbadoes. She read the letter eagerly and hastily.
‘Dear Sir’—it ran—‘I have had the pleasure already of meeting some members of your family on the other side of the Atlantic’—that was an overstatement, Nora thought to herself quietly; the plural for the singular—‘and as I have come out to look after some property of my father’s here in Barbadoes, I propose to run across to Trinidad also, by the next steamer, and gain a little further insight into the habits and manners of the West Indies. My intention is to stop during my stay with my friend Mr Hawthorn, who—as you doubtless know—holds a district judgeship or something of the sort somewhere in Trinidad. But I think it best at the same time to inclose a letter of introduction to yourself from General Sir Henry Laboutillière, whom I daresay you remember as formerly commandant of Port-of-Spain when the Hundred and Fiftieth were in your island. I shall do myself the honour of calling upon you very shortly after my arrival, and am meanwhile, very faithfully yours,
Harry Noel.’
The letter of introduction which accompanied this very formal note briefly set forth that Sir Walter Noel, Mr Noel’s father, was an exceedingly old and intimate friend of the writer’s, and that he would feel much obliged if Mr Dupuy would pay young Mr Noel any attentions in his power during his short stay in the island of Trinidad.
It would be absurd to deny that Nora felt flattered. She blushed, and blushed, and blushed again, with unmistakable pleasure. To be sure, she had refused Harry Noel; and if he were to ask her again, even now, she would refuse him a second time. But no girl on earth is wholly proof in her own heart against resolute persistence. Even if she doesn’t care a pin for a man from the matrimonial point of view, yet provided only he is ‘nice’ and ‘eligible,’ she feels naturally flattered by the mere fact that he pays her attention. If the attention is marked and often renewed, the flattery is all the deeper, subtler, and more effective. But here was Harry Noel, pursuant of his threat (or should we rather say his promise?), following her up right across the Atlantic, and coming to lay siege to her heart with due formalities once more, in the very centre of her own stronghold! Yes, Nora was undeniably pleased. Of course, she didn’t care for him; oh, dear, no, not the least little bit in the world, really; but still, even if you don’t want to accept a lover, you know, it is at anyrate pleasant to have the opportunity of a second time cruelly rejecting him. So Nora blushed, and smiled to herself, and blushed over again, and felt by no means out of humour at Harry Noel’s evident persistence.