CHAPTER XXXVI.
The gentlemen in the dining-room stood looking at one another in blank dismay for a few seconds, and then Dr Macfarlane broke the breathless silence by saying out loud, with his broad Scotch bluntness: ‘Ye’re a fool, Tom Dupuy—a very fine fool, ye are; and I’m not sorry the young Englishman knocked you down and gave you a lesson, for speaking ill against his own mother.’
‘Where has he gone?’ Dick Castello, the governor’s aide-de-camp, asked quickly, as Tom picked himself up with a sheepish, awkward, drunken look. ‘He can’t sleep here to-night now, you know, and he’ll have to sleep somewhere or other, Macfarlane, won’t he?’
‘Run after him,’ the doctor said, ‘and take him to your own house. Not one of these precious Trinidad folk’ll stir hand or foot to befriend him anyhow, now they’ve been told he’s a brown man.’
Castello took up his hat and ran as fast as he could go after Noel. He caught him up, breathless, half-way down to the gate of the estate; for Harry, though he had gone off hurriedly without hat or coat, was walking alone down the main road coolly enough now, trying to look and feel within himself as though nothing at all unusual in any way had happened. ‘Where are you going to, Noel?’ Castello asked, in a friendly voice.—‘By Jove! I’m jolly glad you knocked that fellow down, and tried to teach him a little manners, though he is old Dupuy’s nephew. But of course you can’t stop there to-night. What do you mean now to do with yourself?’
‘I shall go to Hawthorn’s,’ Harry answered quietly.
‘Better not go there,’ Dick Castello urged, taking him gently by the shoulder. ‘If you do, you know, it’ll look as if you wanted to give a handle to Tom Dupuy and break openly with the whole lot of them. Tom Dupuy insulted you abominably, and you couldn’t have done anything else but knock him down, of course, my dear fellow; and he needed it jolly well, too, we all know perfectly. But don’t let it seem as if you were going to quarrel with the whole lot of us. Come home to my house now at Savannah Garden. I’ll walk straight over there with you and have a room got ready for you at once; and then I’ll go back to Orange Grove for Mrs Castello, and bring across as much of your luggage as I can in my carriage, at least as much as you’ll need for the present.’
‘Very well, Captain Castello,’ answered Noel submissively. ‘It’s very kind of you to take me in. I’ll go with you; you know best about it. But hang it all, you know, upon my word I expect the fellow may have been telling the truth after all, and I daresay I really am what these fools of Trinidad people call a brown man. Did ever you hear such absurd nonsense? Calling me a brown man! As if it ever mattered twopence to any sensible person whether a man was black, brown, white, or yellow, as long as he’s not such a confounded cad and boor as that roaring tipsy lout of a young Dupuy fellow!’
So Harry Noel went that Tuesday night to Captain Castello’s at Savannah Garden, and slept, or rather lay awake, there till Wednesday morning—the morning of the day set aside by Louis Delgado and Isaac Pourtalès for their great rising and general massacre.
As for Nora, she went up to her own boudoir as soon as the guests had gone—they didn’t stay long after this awkward occurrence—and threw herself down once more on the big sofa, and cried as if her heart would burst for very anguish and humiliation.