CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Mr Dupuy was seated quietly at dinner in his own dining-room, with Nora at the opposite end of the table, and Uncle ’Zekiel, the butler, in red plush waistcoat as usual, standing solemnly behind his chair. Mr Dupuy was in excellent spirits, in spite of the little affair of the previous night, for the sugar-cane had cut very heavy, and the boiling was progressing in the most admirable manner. He sipped his glass of St Emilion (as imported) with the slow, easy air of a person at peace with himself and with all creation. The world at large seemed just that moment to suit him excellently. ‘Nora, my dear,’ he drawled out lazily, with the unctuous deliberateness of the full-blooded man well fed, ‘this is a capital pine-apple certainly—a Ripley, I perceive; far superior in flavour, Ripleys, to the cheap common black sugar-pines: always insist upon getting Ripleys.—I think, if you please, I’ll take another piece of that pine-apple.’
Nora cut him a good thick slice from the centre of the fruit—it is only in England that people commit the atrocity of cutting pine in thin layers—and laid down the knife with a stifled yawn upon the tall dessert dish. She was evidently bored—very deeply bored indeed. Orange Grove without Harry Noel began to seem a trifle dull; and it must be confessed that to live for months together with an old gentleman of Mr Dupuy’s sluggish temperament was scarcely a lively mode of life for a pretty, volatile, laughter-loving girl of twenty, like little Nora. ‘What’s this, papa,’ she asked languidly, just by way of keeping up the conversation, ‘about the negroes here in Westmoreland being so dreadfully discontented? Somebody was telling me’—Nora prudently suppressed Marian Hawthorn’s name, for fear of an explosion—‘that there’s a great deal of stir and ferment among the plantation hands. What are they bothering and worrying about now, I wonder?’
Mr Dupuy rolled the remainder of his glassful of claret on his discriminative palate, very reflectively, for half a minute or so, and then answered in his most leisurely fashion: ‘Lies, lies—a pack of lies, the whole lot of it, Nora. I know who you heard that from, though you won’t tell me so. You heard it from some of your fine coloured friends there, over at Mulberry.—Now, don’t deny it, for I won’t believe you. When I say a thing, you know I mean it. You heard it, I say, from some of these wretched, disaffected coloured people. And there isn’t a word of truth in the whole story—not a syllable—not a shadow—not a grain—not a penumbra. Absolute falsehood, the entire lot of it, got up by these designing radical coloured people, to serve their own private purposes. I assure you, Nora, there isn’t in the whole world a finer, better paid, better fed, better treated, or more happy and contented peasantry than our own comfortable West Indian negroes. For my part, I can’t conceive what on earth they’ve ever got to be discontented about.’
‘But, papa, they do say there’s a great chance of a regular rising.’
‘Rising, my dear!—rising! Did you say a rising? Ho, ho! that’s really too ridiculous! What, these niggers rise in revolt against the white people! Why, my dear child, they’d never dare to do it. A pack of cowardly, miserable, quaking and quavering nigger blackguards. Rise, indeed! I’d like to see them try it! O no; nothing of the sort. Somebody’s been imposing on you. They’re too afraid of us, my dear, ever to think of venturing upon a regular rising. Show me a nigger, I always say to anybody who talks that sort of nonsense to me, and I’ll show you a coward, and a thief too, and a liar, and a vagabond.—’Zekiel, you rascal, pour me out another glass of claret, sir, this minute!’
Uncle ’Zekiel poured out the claret for his red-faced master with a countenance wholly unclouded by this violent denunciation of his own race; to say the truth, the old butler was too much accustomed to similar sentiments from Mr Dupuy’s lips ever to notice particularly what his master was saying. He smiled and grinned, and showed his own white teeth good-humouredly as he laid down the claret jug, exactly as though Mr Dupuy had been ascribing to the African race in general, and to himself in particular, all the virtues and excellences ever observed in the most abstractly perfect human character.
‘No,’ Mr Dupuy went on dogmatically, ‘they won’t rise: a pack of mean-spirited, cowardly, ignorant vagabonds as ever were born, the niggers, the whole lot of them. I never knew a nigger yet who had a single ounce of courage in him. You might walk over them, and trample them down in heavy riding-boots, and they wouldn’t so much as dare to raise a finger against you. And besides, what have they got to rise for? Haven’t they got everything they can ever expect to have? Haven’t they got their freedom and their cottages? But they’re always grumbling, always grumbling about something or other—a set of idle, lazy, discontented vagabonds as ever I set eyes on!’
‘I thought you said just now,’ Nora put in with a provoking smile, ‘they were the finest, happiest, and most contented peasantry to be found anywhere.’
There was nothing more annoying to Mr Dupuy than to have one of his frequent conversational inconsistencies ruthlessly brought home to him by his own daughter—the only person in the whole world who would ever have ventured upon taking such an unwarrantable liberty. So he laid down his glass of claret with a forced smile, and by way of changing the subject, said unconcernedly: ‘Bless my soul, what on earth can all that glare be over yonder? Upon my word, now I look at it, I fancy, Nora, it seems to come from the direction of the trash-houses.’