Mr Dupuy astutely held his tongue. Noblesse did not so far impose upon him as to oblige him to confess that it was Harry Noel he, too, had come down in search of. But as soon as the steamer was well alongside, Mr Dupuy, in his stately, slow, West Indian manner, sailed ponderously down the special gangway, and asked a steward at once to point out to him which of the passengers was Mr Noel.
Harry Noel, when he received Mr Dupuy’s pressing invitation, was naturally charmed at the prospect of thus being quartered under the same roof with pretty little Nora. Had he known the whole circumstances of the case, indeed, his native good feeling would, of course, have prompted him to go to the Hawthorns’; but Edward had been restrained by a certain sense of false shame from writing the whole truth about this petty local race prejudice to his friend in England; and so Harry jumped at once at the idea of being so comfortably received into the very house of which he so greatly desired to become an inmate. ‘You’re very good, I’m sure,’ he answered in his off-hand manner to the old planter. ‘Upon my word, I never met anything in my life to equal your open-hearted West Indian hospitality. Wherever one goes, one’s uniformly met with open arms. I shall be delighted, Mr Dupuy, to put up at your place—Orange Grove, I think you call it—ah, exactly—if you’ll kindly permit me.—Here, you fellow, go down below, will you, and ask for my luggage.’
Edward Hawthorn was a minute or two too late. Harry came forward eagerly, in the old friendly fashion, to grasp his hand with a hard grip, but explained to him with a look, which Edward immediately understood, that Orange Grove succeeded in offering him superior attractions even to Mulberry. So the very next day found Nora and Harry Noel seated together at lunch at Mr Dupuy’s well-loaded table; while Tom Dupuy, who had actually stolen an hour or two from his beloved canes, dropped in casually to take stock of this new possible rival, as he half suspected the gay young Englishman would turn out to be. From the first moment that their eyes met, Tom Dupuy conceived an immediate dislike and distrust for Harry Noel. What did he want coming here to Trinidad? Tom wondered: a fine-spoken, stuck-up, easy-going, haw-haw Londoner, of the sort that your true-born colonist hates and detests with all the force of his good-hater’s nature. Harry irritated him immensely by his natural superiority: a man of Tom Dupuy’s type can forgive anything in any other man except higher intelligence and better breeding. Those are qualities for which he feels a profound contempt, not unmingled with hatred, envy, malice, and all uncharitableness. So, as soon as Nora had risen from the table and the men were left alone, West Indian fashion, to their afternoon cigar and cup of coffee, Tom Dupuy began to open fire at once on Harry about his precious coloured friends the Hawthorns at Mulberry.
‘So you’ve come across partly to see that new man at the Westmoreland District Court, have you?’ he said sneeringly. ‘Well, I daresay he was considered fit company for gentlemen over in England, Mr Noel—people seem to have very queer ideas about what’s a gentleman and what’s not, over in England—but though I didn’t like to speak about it before Nora, seeing that they’re friends of hers, I think I ought to warn you beforehand that you mustn’t have too much to say to them if you want to get on out here in Trinidad. People here are a trifle particular about their company.’
Harry looked across curiously at the young planter, leaning back in awkward fashion with legs outstretched and half turned away from the table, as he sipped his coffee, and answered quietly, with some little surprise: ‘Why, yes, Mr Dupuy, I think our English idea of what constitutes a gentleman does differ slightly in some respects from the one I find current out here in the West Indies. I knew Hawthorn intimately for several years at Cambridge and in London, and the more I knew of him the better I liked him and the more I respected him. He’s a little bit too radical for me, I confess, and a little bit too learned as well; but in every other way, I can’t imagine what possible objection you can bring against him.’
Tom Dupuy smiled an ugly smile, and gazed hard at Harry Noel’s dark and handsome face and features. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, a malevolent light gleaming hastily from his heavy eyes, ‘we West Indians may be prejudiced; they say we are; but still, we’re not fond somehow of making too free with a pack of niggers. Now, I don’t say your friend Hawthorn’s exactly a nigger outside, to look at: he isn’t: he’s managed to hide the outer show of his colour finely. I’ve seen a good many regular white people, or what passed for white people’—and here he glanced significantly at the fine-spoken Londoner’s dark fingers, toying easily with the amber mouthpiece of his dainty cigar-holder—‘who were a good many shades darker in the skin than this fellow Hawthorn, for all they thought themselves such very grand gentlemen. Some of ’em may be coloured, and some of ’em mayn’t: there’s no knowing, when once you get across to England; for people there have no proper pride of race, I understand, and would marry a coloured girl, if she happened to have money, as soon as look at her. But this fellow Hawthorn, though he seems externally as white as you do—and a great deal whiter too, by Jove—is well known out here to be nothing but a coloured person, as his father and his mother were before him.’
Harry Noel puffed out a long stream of white smoke as he answered carelessly: ‘Ah, I daresay he is, if what you mean is just that he’s got some remote sort of negro tinge somewhere about him—though he doesn’t look it; but I expect almost all the old West Indian families, you know, must have intermarried long ago, when English ladies were rare in the colonies, with pretty half-castes.’
Quite unwittingly, the young Englishman had trodden at once on the very tenderest and dearest corn of his proud and unbending West Indian entertainers. Pride of blood is the one form of pride that they thoroughly understand and sympathise with; and this remote hint of a possible (and probable) distant past when the purity of the white race was not quite so efficiently guaranteed as it is nowadays, roused both the fiery Dupuys immediately to a white-heat of indignation.
‘Sir,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy said stiffly, ‘you evidently don’t understand the way in which we regard these questions out here in the colonies, and especially in Trinidad. There is one thing which your English parliament has not taken from us, and can never take from us; and that is the pure European blood which flows unsullied in all our veins, nowhere polluted by the faintest taint of a vile African intermixture.’
‘Certainly,’ Mr Tom Dupuy echoed angrily, ‘if you want to call us niggers, you’d better call us niggers outright, and not be afraid of it.’