It was perfectly true. Strange as such a relationship sounds to English ears, in the West Indies cases of the sort are as common as earthquakes. In many a cultivated light-brown family, where the young ladies of the household, pretty and well educated, expect and hope to marry an English officer of good connections, the visitor knows that, in some small room or other of the back premises, there still lingers on feebly an old black hag, wrinkled and toothless, full of strange oaths and incomprehensible African jargons, who is nevertheless the grandmother of the proud and handsome girls, busy over Mendelssohn’s sonatas and the Saturday Review, in the front drawing-room. Into such a family it was that Sir Walter Noel, head of the great Lincolnshire house, had actually married. The Budleighs of the Wilderness had migrated to England before the abolition of slavery, when the future Lady Noel was still a baby; and getting easily into good society in London, had only been known as West Indian proprietors in those old days when to be a West Indian proprietor was still equivalent to wealth and prosperity, not, as now, to poverty and bankruptcy.
Strange to say, too, Lady Noel herself was not by any means so dark as her son Harry. The Lincolnshire Noels belonged themselves to the black-haired type so common in their county; and the union of the two strains had produced in Harry a complexion several degrees more swarthy than that of either of his handsome parents. In England, nobody would ever have noticed this little peculiarity; they merely said that Harry was the very image of the old Noel family portraits; but in Trinidad, where the abiding traces of negro blood are so familiarly known and so carefully looked for, it was almost impossible for him to pass a single day without his partially black descent being immediately suspected. He had ‘thrown back,’ as the colonists coarsely phrase it, to the dusky complexion of his quadroon ancestors.
Louis Delgado hugged himself and grinned at this glorious discovery. ‘Ha, ha!’ he cried, rocking himself rapidly to and fro in a perfect frenzy of gratified vindictiveness; ‘him doan’t buckra, den!—him doan’t buckra! He hold himself so proud, an’ look down on naygur; an’ after all, him doan’t buckra, him only brown man! De Lard be praise, I gwine to humble him! I gwine to let him know him doan’t buckra!’
‘You will tell him?’ Rosina Fleming asked curiously.
Delgado danced about the hut in a wild ecstasy, with his fingers snapping about in every direction, like the half-tamed African savage that he really was. ‘Tell him, Missy Rosie!’ he echoed contemptuously—‘tell him, you sayin’ to me! Yah, yah! you hab no sense, missy. I doan’t gwine to tell him, for certain; I gwine to tell dat cheatin’ scoundrel, Tom Dupuy, missy, so humble him in de end de wuss for all dat.’
Rosina gazed at him in puzzled bewilderment. ‘Tom Dupuy!’ she repeated slowly. ‘You gwine to tell Tom Dupuy, you say, Mistah Delgado! What de debbel de use, I wonder, sah, ob tell Tom Dupuy dat de buckra gentleman an’ Isaac is own cousin?’
Delgado executed another frantic pas de seul across the floor of the hut, to work off his mad excitement, and then answered gleefully: ‘Ha, ha, Missy Rosie, you is woman, you is creole naygur gal—you doan’t understan’ de depth an’ de wisdom ob African naygur. Look you here, me fren’, I explain you all about it. De missy up at house, him fall in lub wit dis brown man, Noel. Tom Dupuy, him want for go an’ marry de missy. Dat make Tom Dupuy hate de brown man. I tell him, Noel doan’t no buckra—him common brown man, own cousin to Isaac Pourtalès. Den Tom Dupuy laugh at Noel! Ha, ha! I turn de hand ob one proud buckra to bring down de pride ob de odder!’
Isaac Pourtalès laughed too. ‘Ha, ha!’ he cried, ‘him is proud buckra, an’ him is me own cousin! I hate him!’
Rosina gazed at her mulatto lover in rueful silence. She liked the English stranger—he had given her a shilling one day to post a letter for him—but still, she daren’t go back upon Isaac and Louis Delgado. ‘Him is fren’ ob Mistah Hawtorn,’ she murmured apologetically at last after a minute’s severe reflection—‘great fren’ ob Mistah Hawtorn. Dem is old-time fren’ in Englan’ togedder; and when Mistah Tom Dupuy speak bad ’bout Mistah Hawtorn, Mistah Noel him flare up like angry naygur, an’ him gib him de lie, an’ him speak out well for him!’
Delgado checked himself, and looked closely at the hesitating negress with more deliberation. ‘Him is fren’ ob Mistah Hawtorn,’ he said in a meditative voice—‘him is fren’ ob Mistah Hawtorn! De fren’ ob de Lard’s fren’ shall come to no harm. I gwine to tell Tom Dupuy. I must humble de buckra. But in de great an’ terrible day, dem shall not hurt a hair of him head, if de Lard wills it.’ And then he added somewhat louder, in his own sonorous and mystic Arabic: ‘The effendi’s brother is dear to Allah even as the good effendi himself is.’