And then they began unburdening their hearts to Harry Noel with the long arrears of twelve months’ continuous confidences. It was such a relief to get a little fresh external sympathy, to be able to talk about it all to somebody just come from England, and entirely free from the taint of West Indian prejudice. They told Harry everything, without reserve; and Harry listened, growing more and more indignant every minute, to the long story of petty slights and undeserved insults. At last he could restrain his wrath no longer. ‘It’s preposterous,’ he cried, walking up and down the piazza angrily, by way of giving vent to his suppressed emotion; ‘it’s abominable! it’s outrageous! it’s not to be borne with! The idea of these people, these hole-and-corner nobodies, these miserable, stupid, ignorant noodles, with no more education or manners than an English ploughboy—O yes, my dear fellow, I know what they are—I’ve seen them in Barbadoes—setting themselves up to be better than you are—there, upon my word I’ve really no patience with it. I shall flog some of them soundly, some day, before I’ve done with them; I know I shall. I can’t avoid it. But what on earth can have induced you to stop here, my dear Teddy, when you might have gone back again comfortably to England, and have mixed properly in the sort of society you’re naturally fitted for?’
‘I did,’ Marian answered firmly; ‘I induced him, Mr Noel. I wouldn’t let him run away from these miserable people. And besides, you know, he’s been able to do such a lot of good here. All the negroes love him dearly, because he’s protected them from so much injustice. He’s the most popular man in the island with the black people; he’s been so good to them, and so useful to them, and such a help against the planters, who are always trying their hardest to oppress them. And isn’t that something worth staying for, in spite of everything?’
Harry Noel paused and hesitated. ‘Tastes differ, Mrs Hawthorn,’ he answered more soberly. ‘For my part, I can’t say I feel myself very profoundly interested in the eternal nigger question; though, if a man feels it’s his duty to stop and see the thing out to the bitter end, why, of course he ought in that case to stop and see it. But what does rile me is the idea that these wretched Dupuy people should venture to talk in the way they do about such a man as your husband—confound them!’
Tea interrupted his flow of indignation.
But when Harry Noel had ridden away again towards Orange Grove on Mr Dupuy’s pony, Hawthorn and his wife stood looking at one another in dubious silence for a few minutes. Neither of them liked to utter the thought that had been uppermost in both their minds from the first moment they saw him in Trinidad.
At last Edward broke the ominous stillness. ‘Harry Noel’s awfully dark, isn’t he, Marian?’ he said uneasily.
‘Very,’ Marian answered in as unconcerned a voice as she could well summon up. ‘And so extremely handsome, too, Edward,’ she added after a moment’s faint pause, as if to turn the current of the conversation.
Neither of them had ever observed in England how exceedingly olive-coloured Harry Noel’s complexion really was—in England, to be as dark as a gipsy is of no importance; but now in Trinidad, girt round by all that curiously suspicious and genealogically inquiring society, they couldn’t help noticing to themselves what a very dark skin and what curly hair he happened to have inherited.
‘And his mother’s a Barbadian lady,’ Edward went on uncomfortably, pretending to play with a book and a paper-knife.
‘She is,’ Marian answered, hardly daring to look up at her husband’s face in her natural confusion. ‘He—he always seems so very fond of his mother, Edward, darling.’