CHAPTER XXXI.
Delgado had fixed ‘the great and terrible day’ for Wednesday evening. On Monday afternoon, Harry and Nora, accompanied by Mr Dupuy, went for a ride in the cool of dusk among the hills together. Trinidad that day was looking its very best. The tall and feathery bamboos that overhung the serpentine pathways stood out in exquisite clearness of outline, like Japanese designs, against the tender background of pearl-gray sky. The tree ferns rose lush and green among the bracken after yesterday’s brief and refreshing thunder-shower. The scarlet hibiscus trees beside the negro huts were in the full blush of their first flowering season. The poinsettias, not, as in England, mere stiff standard plants from florists’ cuttings, but rising proudly into graceful trees of free and rounded growth, with long drooping branches, spread all about their great rosettes of crimson leaflets to the gorgeous dying sunlight. The broad green foliage of the ribbed bananas in the negro gardens put to shame the flimsy tropical make-believes of Kew or Monte Carlo. For the first time, it seemed to Harry Noel he was riding through the true and beautiful tropics of poets and painters; and the reason was not difficult to guess, for Nora—Nora really seemed to be more kindly disposed to him. After all, she was not made of stone, and they had an interest in common which the rest of the house of Dupuy did not share with Nora—the interest in Edward and Marian Hawthorn. You can’t have a better introduction to any girl’s heart—though I daresay it may be very wicked indeed to acknowledge it—than a common attachment to somebody or something tabooed or opposed by the parental authorities.
Mr Dupuy rode first in the little single-file cavalcade, as became the senior; and Mr Dupuy’s cob had somehow a strange habit of keeping fifty yards ahead of the other horses, which gave its owner on this particular occasion no little trouble. Harry and Nora followed behind at a respectful distance; and Harry, who had bought a new horse of his own the day before, and who brought up the rear on his fresh mount, seemed curiously undesirous of putting his latest purchase through its paces, as one might naturally have expected him to do under the circumstances. On the contrary, he hung about behind most unconscionably, delaying Nora by every means in his power; and Mr Dupuy, looking back from his cob every now and again, grew almost weary of calling out a dozen times over: ‘Now then, Nora, you can canter up over this little bit of level, and catch me up, can’t you, surely?’
‘If it weren’t for the old gentleman,’ Harry thought to himself more than once, ‘I really think I should take this opportunity of speaking again to Nora’—he always called her ‘Nora’ in his own heart—a well-known symptom of the advanced stages of the disease—though she was of course ‘Miss Dupuy’ alone in conversation. ‘Or even if we were on a decent English road, now, where you can ride two abreast, and have a tête-à-tête quite as comfortably as in an ordinary drawing-room! But it’s clearly impossible to propose to a girl when she’s riding a whole horse’s length in front of you on a one-horse pathway. You can’t shout out to her: “My beloved, I adore you,” at the top of your voice, as they do at the opera, especially with her own father—presumably devoted to the rival interest—hanging ahead within moderate earshot.’ So Harry was compelled to repress for the present his ardent declaration, and continue talking to Nora Dupuy about Edward and Marian, a subject which, as he acutely perceived, was more likely to bring them into sympathy with one another than any alternative theme he could possibly have hit upon.
Presently, they descended again upon the plain, and Mr Dupuy was just about to rejoin them in a narrow lane, almost wide enough for three abreast, and bordered by a prickly hedge of cactus and pinguin, when, to Nora’s great surprise, Tom Dupuy, on his celebrated chestnut mare Sambo Gal, came cantering up in the opposite direction, as if on purpose to catch and meet them. Tom wasn’t often to be found away from his canes at that time of day, and Nora had very little doubt indeed that he had caught a glimpse of Harry and herself from Pimento Valley, on the zigzag mountain path, without noticing her father on in front of them, and had ridden out with the express intention of breaking in upon their supposed tête-à-tête.
Mr Dupuy unconsciously prevented him from carrying out this natural design. Meeting his nephew first in the narrow pathway, he was just going to make him turn round and ride alongside with him, when Nora, seized with a sudden fancy, half whispered to Harry Noel: ‘I’m not going to ride with Tom Dupuy; I can’t endure him; I shall turn and ride back in the opposite direction.’
‘We must tell your father,’ Harry said, hesitating.
‘Of course,’ Nora answered decidedly.—‘Papa,’ she continued, raising her voice, ‘we’re going to ride back again and round by Delgado’s hut, you know—the mountain-cabbage palm-tree way is so much prettier, and I want to show it to Mr Noel. You and Tom Dupuy can turn and follow us.—The cob always goes ahead, you see, Mr Noel, if once he’s allowed to get in front of the other horses.’
They turned back once more in this reversed order, Nora and Harry Noel leading the way, and Mr Dupuy, abreast with Tom, following behind somewhat angrily, till they came to a point in the narrow lane where a gap in the hedge led into a patch of jungle on the right-hand side. An old negro had crept out of it just before them, carrying on his head, poised quite evenly, a big fagot of sticks for his outdoor fireplace. The old man kept the middle of the lane, just in front of them, and made not the slightest movement to right or left, as if he had no particular intention of allowing them to pass. Harry had just given his new horse a tap with the whip, and they were trotting along to get well in front of the two followers, so he didn’t greatly relish this untoward obstacle thrown so unexpectedly in his way. ‘Get out of the road, will you, you there!’ he shouted angrily. ‘Don’t you see a lady’s coming? Stand aside this minute, my good fellow, and let her pass, I tell you.’
Delgado turned around, almost as the horse’s nose was upon him, and looking the young man defiantly in the face, answered with an obvious sneer: ‘Who is you, sah, dat you speak to me like-a dat? Dis is de Queen high-road, for naygur an’ for buckra. You doan’t got no right at all to turn me off it.’