Isaac Pourtalès, nothing loth, poured forth at once in Tom Dupuy’s listening ear the whole story, so far as he knew it, of Lady Noel’s antecedents in Barbadoes. While the two men, the white and the brown, were still conversing under the shade of the star-apple tree, Nora, who had come down to the drawing-room meanwhile, strolled out for a minute, beguiled by the cool air, on to the smoothly kept lawn in front of the drawing-room window. Tom saw her, and beckoned her to him with his finger, exactly as he had beckoned the tall mulatto. Nora gazed at the beckoning hand with the intensest disdain, and then turned away, as if perfectly unconscious of his ungainly gesture, to examine the tuberoses and great bell-shaped brugmansias of the garden border.
Tom walked up to her angrily and rudely. ‘Didn’t you see me calling you, miss?’ he said in his harsh drawl, with no pretence of unnecessary politeness. ‘Didn’t you see I wanted to speak to you?’
‘I saw you making signs to somebody with your hand, as if you took me for a servant,’ Nora answered coldly; ‘and not having been accustomed in England to be called in that way, I thought you must have made a mistake as to whom you were dealing with.’
Tom started and muttered an ugly oath. ‘In England,’ he repeated. ‘Oh, ah, in England. West Indian gentlemen, it seems, aren’t good enough for you, miss, since this fellow Noel has come out to make up to you. I suppose you don’t happen to know that he’s a West Indian too, and a precious queer sort of one into the bargain? I know you mean to marry him, miss; but all I can tell you is, your father and I are not going to permit it.’
‘I don’t wish to marry him,’ Nora answered, flushing fiery red all over (‘Him is pretty for true when him blush like dat,’ Isaac Pourtalès said to himself from the shade of the star-apple tree). ‘But if I did, I wouldn’t listen to anything you might choose to say against him, Tom Dupuy; so that’s plain speaking enough for you.’
Tom sneered. ‘O no,’ he said; ‘I always knew you’d end by marrying a woolly-headed mulatto; and this man’s one, I don’t mind telling you. He’s a brown man born; his mother, though she is Lady Noel—fine sort of a Lady, indeed—is nothing better than a Barbadoes brown girl; and he’s own cousin to Isaac Pourtalès over yonder! He is, I swear to you.—Isaac, come here, sir!’
Nora gave a little suppressed scream of surprise and horror as the tall mulatto, in his ragged shirt, leering horribly, emerged unexpectedly, like a black spectre, from the shadows opposite.
‘Isaac,’ the young planter said with a malicious smile, ‘who is this young man, I want to know, that calls himself Mister Noel?’
Isaac Pourtalès touched his slouching hat awkwardly as he answered, under his breath, with an ugly scowl: ‘Him me own cousin, sah, an’ me mudder cousin. Him an’ me mudder is fam’ly long ago in ole Barbadoes.’
‘There you are, Nora!’ Tom Dupuy cried out to her triumphantly. ‘You see what sort of person your fine English friend has turned out to be.’