‘Upon my word,’ Harry Noel answered with an apologetic smile, ‘I hadn’t the least intention, my dear sir, of seeming to hint anything against the purity of blood in West Indians generally; I only meant, that if my friend Hawthorn—who is really a very good fellow and a perfect gentleman—does happen to have a little distant infusion of negro blood in him, it doesn’t seem to me to matter much to any of us nowadays. It must be awfully little—a mere nothing, you know; just the amount one would naturally expect if his people had intermarried once with half-castes a great many generations ago. I was only standing up for my friend, you see.—Surely,’ turning to Tom, who still glared at him like a wild beast aroused, ‘a man ought to stand up for his friends when he hears them ill spoken of.’
‘Oh, quite so,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy replied, in a mollified voice. ‘Of course, if Mr Hawthorn’s a friend of yours, and you choose to stand by him here, in spite of his natural disabilities, on the ground that you happened to know him over in England—where, I believe, he concealed the fact of his being coloured—and you don’t like now to turn your back upon him, why, naturally, that’s very honourable of you, very honourable.—Tom, my dear boy, we must both admit that Mr Noel is acting very honourably. And, indeed, we can’t expect people brought up wholly in England’—Mr Dupuy dwelt softly upon this fatal disqualification, as though aware that Harry must be rather ashamed of it—‘to feel upon these points exactly as we do, who have a better knowledge and insight into the negro blood and the negro character.’
‘Certainly not,’ Tom Dupuy continued maliciously. ‘People in England don’t understand these things at all as we do.—Why, Mr Noel, you mayn’t be aware of it, but even among the highest English aristocracy there are an awful lot of regular coloured people, out-and-out mulattoes. West Indian heiresses in the old days used to go home—brown girls, or at anyrate young women with a touch of the tar-brush—daughters of governors and so forth, on the wrong side of the house—you understand’—Mr Tom Dupuy accompanied these last words with an upward and backward jerk of his left thumb, supplemented by a peculiarly ugly grimace, intended to be facetious—‘the sort of trash no decent young fellow over here would have so much as touched with a pair of tongs (in the way of marrying ’em, I mean); and when they got across to England, were snapped up at once by dukes and marquises, whose descendants, after all, though they may be lords, are really nothing better, you see, than common brown people!’
He spoke snappishly, but Harry only looked across at him in mild wonder. On the calm and unquestioning pride of a Lincolnshire Noel, remarks such as these fell flat and pointless. If a Noel had chosen to marry a kitchen-maid, according to their simple old-fashioned faith, he would have ennobled her at once, and lifted her up into his own exalted sphere of life and action. Her children after her would have been Lincolnshire Noels, the equals of any duke or marquis in the United Kingdom. So Harry only smiled benignly, and answered in his easy off-hand manner: ‘By Jove, I shouldn’t wonder at all if that were really the case now. One reads in Thackeray, you know, so much about the wealthy West Indian heiresses, with suspiciously curly hair, who used to swarm in London in the old slavery days. But of course, Mr Dupuy, it’s a well-known fact that all our good families have been awfully recruited by actresses and so forth. I believe some statistical fellow or other has written a book to show that if it weren’t for the actresses, the peerage and baronetage would all have died out long ago, of pure inanition. I daresay the West Indian heiresses, with the frizzy hair, helped to fulfil the same good and useful purpose, by bringing an infusion of fresh blood every now and then into our old families.’ And Harry ran his hand carelessly through his own copious curling black locks, in perfect unconsciousness of the absurdly malapropos nature of that instinctive action at that particular moment. His calm sense of utter superiority—that innate belief so difficult to shake, even on the most rational grounds, in most well-born and well-bred Englishmen—kept him even from suspecting the real drift of Tom Dupuy’s reiterated innuendoes.
‘You came out to Barbadoes to look after some property of your father’s, I believe?’ Mr Dupuy put in, anxious to turn the current of the conversation from this very dangerous and fitful channel.
‘I did,’ Harry Noel answered unconcernedly. ‘My father’s, or rather my mother’s. Her people have property there. We’re connected with Barbadoes, indeed. My mother’s family were Barbadian planters.’
At the word, Tom Dupuy almost jumped from his seat and brought his fist down heavily upon the groaning table. ‘They were?’ he cried inquiringly. ‘Barbadian planters? You don’t mean to say, then, Mr Noel, that some of your own people were really and truly born West Indians?’
‘Why on earth should he want to get so very excited about it?’ Harry Noel thought to himself hastily. ‘What on earth can it matter to him whether my people were Barbadian planters or Billingsgate fishmongers?’—‘Yes, certainly, they were,’ he went on to Tom Dupuy with a placid smile of quiet amusement. ‘Though my mother was never in the island herself from the time she was a baby, I believe, still all her family were born and bred there, for some generations.—But why do you ask me? Did you know anything of her people—the Budleighs of the Wilderness?’
‘No, no; I didn’t know anything of them,’ Tom Dupuy replied hurriedly, with a curious glance sideways at his uncle.—‘But, ’pon my honour, Uncle Theodore, it’s really a very singular thing, now one comes to think of it, that Mr Noel should happen to come himself, too, from a West Indian family.’
As Harry Noel happened that moment to be lifting his cup of coffee to his lips, he didn’t notice that Tom Dupuy was pointing most significantly to his own knuckles, and signalling to his uncle, with eyes and fingers, to observe Harry’s. And if he had, it isn’t probable that a Lincolnshire Noel would even have suspected the hidden meaning of those strange and odd-looking monkey-like antics.