At the dinner that evening, Macfarlane, the Scotch doctor, took in Nora; while Harry Noel had handed over to his care a dowager-planteress from a neighbouring estate; so Harry had no need to talk any further to his pretty little hostess during that memorable Tuesday. On Wednesday morning he had made up his mind he would find some excuse to get away from this awkward position in Mr Dupuy’s household; for it was clearly impossible for him to remain there any longer, after he had again asked Nora and been rejected; but of course he couldn’t go so suddenly before the dinner to be given in his honour; and he waited on, impatiently and sullenly.
Tom Dupuy was there too; and even Mr Theodore Dupuy himself, who knew the whole secret of Harry’s black blood, and therefore regarded him now as almost beyond the pale of human sympathy, couldn’t help noticing to himself that his nephew Tom really seemed quite unnecessarily anxious to drag this unfortunate young man Noel into some sort of open rupture. ‘Very ill advised of Tom,’ Mr Dupuy thought to himself; ‘and very bad manners too, for a Dupuy of Trinidad. He ought to know well enough that whatever the young man’s undesirable antecedents may happen to be, as long as he’s here in the position of a guest, he ought at least to be treated with common decency and common politeness. To-morrow, we shall manage to hunt up some excuse, or give him some effectual hint, which will have the result of clearing him bodily off the premises. Till then, Tom ought to endeavour to treat him, as far as possible, in every way like a perfect equal.’
Even during the time while the ladies still remained in the dining-room, Tom Dupuy couldn’t avoid making several severe hits, as he considered them, at Harry Noel from the opposite side of the hospitable table. Harry had happened once to venture on some fairly sympathetic commonplace remark to his dowager-planteress about the planters having been quite ruined by emancipation, when Tom Dupuy fell upon him bodily, and called out with an unconcealed sneer: ‘Ruined by emancipation!—ruined by emancipation! That just shows how much you know about the matter, to talk of the planters being ruined by emancipation! If you knew anything at all of what you’re talking about, you’d know that it wasn’t emancipation in the least that ruined us, but your plaguy parliament doing away with the differential duties.’
Harry bit his lip, and glanced across the table at the young planter with a quiet smile of superiority; but the only word he permitted himself to utter was the one harmless and neutral word ‘Indeed!’
‘O yes, you may say “Indeed” if you like,’ Tom Dupuy retorted warmly. ‘That’s just the way of all you conceited English people. You think you know such a precious lot about the whole subject, and you really and truly know in the end just less than absolutely nothing.’
‘Pardon me,’ Harry answered carelessly, with his wine-glass poised for a moment half lifted in his hand. ‘I admit most unreservedly that you know a great deal more than I do about the differential duties, whatever they may be, for I never so much as heard their very name in all my life until the present moment.’
Tom Dupuy smiled a satisfied smile of complete triumph. ‘I thought as much,’ he said exultantly; ‘I knew you hadn’t. That’s just the way of all English people. They know nothing at all about the most important and essential matters, and yet they venture to talk about them for all the world as if they knew as much as we do about the whole subject.’
‘Really,’ Harry answered with a good-humoured smile, ‘I fancied a man might be fairly well informed about things in general, and yet never have heard in his pristine innocence of the differential duties. I haven’t the very faintest idea myself, to tell you the truth, what they are. Perhaps you will be good enough to lighten my darkness.’
‘What they are!’ Tom Dupuy ejaculated in pious horror. ‘They aren’t anything. They’re done away with. They’ve ceased to exist long ago. You and the other plaguy English people took them off, and ruined the colonies; and now you don’t as much as know what you’ve done, or whether they’re existing still or done away with!’
‘Tom, my boy,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy interposed blandly, ‘you really mustn’t hold Mr Noel personally responsible for all the undoubted shortcomings of the English nation! You must remember that his father is, like ourselves, a West Indian proprietor, and that the iniquitous proceedings with reference to the differential duties—which nobody can for a moment pretend to justify—injured him every bit as much as they injured ourselves.’