‘But what are the differential duties?’ Harry whispered to his next neighbour but one, the Scotch doctor. ‘I never heard of them in my life, I assure you, till this very minute.’
‘Well, you know,’ Dr Macfarlane responded slowly, ‘there was a time when sugar from the British colonies was admitted into Britain at a less duty than sugar from Cuba or other foreign possessions; and at last, the British consumer took the tax off the foreign sugar, and cheapened them all alike in the British market. Very good, of course, for the British consumer, but clean ruination and nothing else for the Trinidad planter.’
For the moment, the conversation changed, but not the smouldering war between the two belligerents. Whatever subject Harry Noel happened to start during that unlucky dinner, Tom Dupuy, watching him closely, pounced down upon him at once like an owl on the hover, and tore him to pieces with prompt activity. Harry bore it all as good-naturedly as he could, though his temper was by no means naturally a forbearing one; but he didn’t wish to come to an open rupture with Tom Dupuy at his uncle’s table, especially after that morning’s occurrences.
As soon as the ladies had left the room, however, Tom Dupuy drew up his chair so as exactly to face Harry, and began to pour out for himself in quick succession glass after glass of his uncle’s fiery sherry, which he tossed off with noisy hilarity. The more he drank, the louder his voice became, and the hotter his pursuit of Harry Noel. At last, when Mr Theodore Dupuy, now really alarmed as to what his nephew was going to say next, ordered in the coffee prematurely, to prevent an open outbreak by rejoining the ladies, Tom walked deliberately over to the sideboard and took out a large square decanter, from which he poured a good-sized liqueur-glassful of some pale liquid for himself and another for Harry.
‘There!’ he cried boisterously. ‘Just you try that, Noel, will you. There’s liquor for you! That’s the real old Pimento Valley rum, the best in the island, double distilled, and thirty years in bottle. You don’t taste any hogo about that, Mr Englishman, eh, do you?’
‘Any what?’ Harry inquired politely, lifting up the glass and sipping a little of the contents out of pure courtesy, for neat rum is not in itself a very enticing beverage to any other than West Indian palates.
‘Any hogo,’ Tom Dupuy repeated loudly and insolently—‘hogo, hogo. I suppose, now, you mean to say you don’t even know what hogo is, do you?—Never heard of hogo? Precious affectation! Don’t understand plain language! Yah, rubbish!
‘Why, no, certainly,’ Harry assented as calmly as he was able; ‘I never before did hear of hogo, I assure you. I haven’t the slightest idea what it is, or whether I ought rather to admire or to deplore its supposed absence in this very excellent old rum of yours.’
‘Hogo’s French,’ Tom Dupuy asserted doggedly, ‘Hogo’s French, and I should have thought you ought to have known it. Everybody in Trinidad knows what hogo is. It’s French, I tell you. Didn’t you ever learn any French at the school you went to, Noel?’
‘Excuse me,’ Harry said, flushing up a little, for Tom Dupuy had asked the question very offensively. ‘It is not French. I know enough of French at least to say that such a word as hogo, whatever it may mean, couldn’t possibly be French for anything.’