The question that should most concern us is not who and what were the ancestors of the human race, but what men are to-day, and what they may well become. It is said that ‘history repeats itself;’ probably it is partially true. The chief business of man in relation to the question of evolution, which the consideration of this subject may tend to lead back to, is to see that that part of history which tells of an early crude barbarism in the ancestry of men does not repeat itself. It rests with men of to-day whether Macaulay’s savage from southern climes shall, or shall not, at some future time stand on London Bridge and contemplate the ruins of a fallen greatness.
IN ALL SHADES.
BY GRANT ALLEN,
Author of ‘Babylon,’ ‘Strange Stories,’ etc. etc.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Next day was Tuesday; and to Louis Delgado and his friends at least, the days were now well worth counting; for was not the hour of the Lord’s deliverance fixed for eight o’clock on Wednesday evening?
Nora, too, had some reason to count the days for her own purposes, for on Tuesday night they were to have a big dinner-party—the biggest undertaken at Orange Grove since Nora had first returned to her father’s house in the capacity of hostess. Mr Dupuy, while still uncertain about Harry Noel’s precise colour, had thought it well—giving him the benefit of the doubt—to invite all the neighbouring planters to meet the distinguished member of the English aristocracy: it reminded him, he said, of those bygone days when Port-of-Spain was crowded with carriages, and Trinidad was still one of the brightest jewels in the British crown (a period perfectly historical in every English colony all the world over, and usually placed about the date when the particular speaker for the time being was just five-and-twenty).
That Tuesday morning, as fate would have it, Mr Dupuy had gone with the buggy into Port-of-Spain for the very prosaic purpose—let us fain confess it—of laying in provisions for the night’s entertainment. In a country where the fish for your evening’s dinner must all have been swimming about merrily in the depths of the sea at eight o’clock the same morning, where your leg of mutton must have been careering joyously in guileless innocence across the grassy plain, and your chicken cutlets must have borne their part in investigating the merits of the juicy caterpillar while you were still loitering over late breakfast, the question of commissariat is of course a far less simple one than in our own well-supplied and market-stocked England. To arrange beforehand that a particular dusky fisherman shall stake his life on the due catching and killing of a turtle for the soup on that identical morning and no other; that a particular oyster-woman shall cut the bivalves for the oyster sauce from the tidal branches of the mangrove swamp not earlier than three or later than five in the afternoon, on her honour as a purveyor; and that a particular lounging negro coffee-planter somewhere on the hills shall guarantee a sufficient supply of black landcrabs for not less than fourteen persons—turtle and oyster and crab being all as yet in the legitimate enjoyment of their perfect natural freedom—all this, I say, involves the possession of strategical faculties of a high order, which would render a man who has once kept house in the West Indies perfectly capable of undertaking the res frumentaria for an English army on one of its innumerable slaughtering picnics for the extension of the blessings of British rule among a totally new set of black, benighted, and hitherto happy heathen. Now, Mr Dupuy was a model entertainer, of the West Indian pattern; and having schemed and devised all these his plans beforehand with profound wisdom, he had now gone into Port-of-Spain with the buggy, on hospitable thoughts intent, to bring out whatever he could get, and make arrangements, by means of tinned provisions from England, for the inevitable deficiencies which always turn up under such circumstances at the last moment. So Harry and Nora were left alone quite to themselves for the whole morning.
The veranda of the house—it fronted on the back garden at Orange Grove—is always the pleasantest place in which to sit during the heat of the day in a West Indian household. The air comes so delightfully fresh through the open spaces of the creeper-covered trellis-work, and the humming-birds buzz about so merrily among the crimson passion-flowers under your very eyes, and the banana bushes whisper so gently before the delicate fanning of the cool sea-breezes in the leafy courtyard, that you lie back dreamily in your folding-chair and half believe yourself, for once in your life, in the poet’s Paradise. On such a veranda, Harry Noel and Nora Dupuy sat together that Tuesday morning; Harry pretending to read a paper, which lay, however, unfolded on his knees—what does one want with newspapers in Paradise?—and Nora almost equally pretending to busy herself, Penelope-like, with a wee square of dainty crewel-work, concerning which it need only be said that one small flower appeared to take a most unconscionable and incredible time for its proper shaping. They were talking together as young man and maiden will talk to one another idly under such circumstances—circling half unconsciously round and round the object of both their thoughts, she avoiding it, and he perpetually converging towards it, till at last, like a pair of silly, fluttering moths around the flame of the candle, they find themselves finally landed, by a sudden side-flight in the very centre at an actual declaration.
‘Really,’ Harry said at length, at a pause in the conversation, ‘this is positively too delicious, Miss Dupuy, this sunshine and breeziness. How the light glances on the little green lizards on the wall over yonder! How beautiful the bougainvillea looks, as it clambers with its great purple masses over that big bare trunk there! We have a splendid bougainvillea in the greenhouse at our place in Lincolnshire; but oh, what a difference, when one sees it clambering in its native wildness like that, from the poor little stunted things we trail and crucify on our artificial supports over yonder in England! I almost feel inclined to take up my abode here altogether, it all looks so green and sunny and bright and beautiful.’