‘As my nephew pronounces it,’ Mr Dupuy put in diplomatically, ‘you may perhaps have some difficulty in recognising its meaning; but it’s our common West Indian corruption, Mr Noel, of haut goût—haut goût, you understand me—precisely so; haut goût, or hogo, being the strong and somewhat offensive molasses-like flavour of new rum, before it has been mellowed, as this of ours has been, by being kept for years in the wood and in bottle.’
‘Oh, ah, that’s all very well! I suppose you’re going to turn against me now, Uncle Theodore,’ Tom Dupuy exclaimed angrily—he was reaching the incipient stage of quarrelsome drunkenness. ‘I suppose you must go and make fun of me, too, for my French pronunciation as well as this fine-spoken Mr Noel here. But I don’t care a pin about it, or about either of you, either. Who’s Mr Noel, I should like to know, that he should come here, with his fine new-fangled English ways, setting himself up to be better than we are, and teaching us to improve our French pronunciation?—O yes, it’s all very fine; but what does he want to go stopping in our houses for, with our own ladies, and all that, and then going and visiting with coloured rubbish that I wouldn’t touch with a pair of tongs—the woolly-headed niggers!—that’s what I want to know, Uncle Theodore?’
Mr Dupuy and Harry rose together. ‘Tom, Tom!’ Mr Dupuy cried warningly, ‘you are quite forgetting yourself. Remember that this gentleman is my guest, and is here to-day by my invitation. How dare you say such things as that to my own guest, sir, at my own table? You insult me, sir, you insult me!’
‘I think,’ Harry interrupted, white with anger, ‘I had better withdraw at once, Mr Dupuy, before things go any further, from a room where I am evidently, quite without any intention on my own part, a cause of turmoil and disagreement.’
He moved hastily towards the open window which gave upon the lawn, where the ladies were strolling, after the fashion of the country, in the silvery moonlight, among the tropical shrubbery. But Tom Dupuy jumped up before him and stood in his way, now drunk with wine and rum and insolence and temper, and blocked his road to the open window.
‘No, no!’ he cried, ‘you shan’t go yet!—I’ll tell you all the reason why, gentlemen. He shall hear the truth. I’ll take the vanity and nonsense out of him! He’s a brown man himself, nothing but a brown man!—Do you know, you fine fellow you, that you’re only, after all, a confounded woolly-headed brown mulatto? You are, sir! you are, I tell you! Look at your hands, you nigger, look at your hands, I say, if ever you doubt it.’
Harry Noel’s proud lip curled contemptuously as he pushed the half-tipsy planter aside with his elbow, and began to stride angrily away towards the moonlit shrubbery. ‘I daresay I am,’ he answered coolly, for he was always truthful, and it flashed across his mind in the space of a second that Tom Dupuy was very possibly right enough. ‘But if I am, my good fellow, I will no longer inflict my company, I tell you, upon persons who, I see, are evidently so little desirous of sharing it any further.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Tom Dupuy exclaimed madly, planting himself once more like a fool in front of the angry and retreating Englishman, ‘he’s a brown man, a mulatto, a coloured fellow, gentlemen, own cousin of that precious nigger scamp, Isaac Pourtalès, whose woolly head I’d like to knock this minute against his own woolly head, the insolent upstart! Why, gentlemen, do you know who his mother was? Do you know who this fine Lady Noel was that he wants to come over us with? She was nothing better, I swear to you solemnly, than a common brown wench over in Barbadoes!’
Harry Noel’s face grew livid purple with that foul insult, as he leapt like a wild beast at the roaring West Indian, and with one fierce blow sent him reeling backward upon the floor at his feet like a senseless lump of dead matter. ‘Hound and cur! how dare you?’ he hissed out hoarsely, planting his foot contemptuously on the fallen planter’s crumpled shirt-front. ‘How dare you?—how dare you? Say what you will of me, myself, you miserable blackguard—but my mother! my mother!’ And then, suddenly recollecting himself, with a profound bow to the astonished company, he hurried out, hatless and hot, on to the darkling shrubbery, casting the dust of Orange Grove off his feet half instinctively behind him as he went.
Next moment a soft voice sounded low beside him, to his intense astonishment. As he strode alone across the dark lawn, Nora Dupuy, who had seen the whole incident from the neighbouring shrubbery, glided out to his side from the shadow of the star-apple tree and whispered a few words earnestly in his ear. Harry Noel, still white with passion and trembling in every muscle like a hunted animal, could not but stop and listen to them eagerly even in that supreme moment of righteous indignation. ‘Thank you, Mr Noel,’ she said simply—‘thank you, thank you!’