Uncle ’Zekiel, standing up behind his master’s chair, and gazing outward, could see more easily over the dining-table, and out through the open doorway of the room, to the hillside beyond, where the glare came from. In a moment, he realised the full meaning of the unwonted blaze, and cried out sharply, in his shrill old tones: ‘O sah, O sah! de naygurs hab risen, an’ dem burnin’ de trash-houses, dem burnin’ de trash-houses!’
Mr Dupuy, aghast with righteous anger and astonishment, could hardly believe his own ears at this unparalleled piece of nigger impertinence coming from so old a servant as Uncle ’Zekiel. He turned round upon his trusty butler slowly and solemnly, chair and all, and with his two hands planted firmly on his capacious knees, he said in his most awful voice: ‘’Zekiel, I’m quite at a loss to understand what you can mean by such conduct. Didn’t you hear me distinctly say to Miss Nora this very minute that the niggers don’t rise, won’t rise, can’t rise, and never have risen? How dare you, sir, how dare you contradict me to my very face in this disgraceful, unaccountable manner?’
But Uncle ’Zekiel, quite convinced in his own mind of the correctness of his own hasty inference, could only repeat, more and more energetically every minute: ‘It de trut’ I tellin’ you, sah; it de trut’ I tellin’ you. Naygur hab risen, runnin’ an’ shoutin’, kickin’ fire about, an’ burnin’ de trash-houses!’
Mr Dupuy rose from the table, pale but incredulous. Nora jumped up, white and terrified, but with a mute look of horror-struck appeal to Uncle ’Zekiel. ‘Doan’t you be afraid, missy,’ the old man whispered to her in a loud undertone; ‘we fight all de naygur in all Trinidad before we let dem hurt a single hair ob your sweet, pretty, white, little head, dearie.’
At that moment, for the first time, a loud shout burst suddenly upon their astonished ears, a mingled tumultuous yell of ‘Kill de buckra—kill de buckra!’ broken by deep African guttural mumblings, and the crackling noise of the wild flames among the dry cane-refuse. It was the shout that the negroes raised as Delgado called them back from the untimely fire to their proper work of bloodshed and massacre.
In her speechless terror, Nora flung herself upon her father’s arms, and gazed out upon the ever reddening glare beyond with unspeakable alarm.
Next minute, the cry from without rose again louder and louder: ‘Buckra country for us! Kill de buckra! Colour for colour! Kill dem—kill dem!’ And then, another deep negro voice, clearer and shriller far than all of them, broke the deathly stillness that succeeded for a second, with the perfectly audible and awful words: ‘Follow me! I gwine to lead you to kill de Dupuys an’ all de buckra!’
‘’Zekiel!’ Mr Dupuy said, coming to himself, and taking down his walking-stick with that calm unshaken courage in which the white West Indian has never been found lacking in the hour of danger—‘’Zekiel, come with me! I must go out at once and quell these rioters.’
Nora gazed at him in blank dismay. ‘Papa, papa!’ she cried breathlessly, ‘you’re not going out to them just with your stick, are you? You’re not going out alone to all these wretches without even so much as a gun or a pistol!’
‘My dear,’ Mr Dupuy answered, coolly and collectedly, disengaging himself from her arms not without some quiet natural tenderness, ‘don’t be alarmed. You don’t understand these people as well as I do. I’m a magistrate for the county: they’ll respect my position. The moment I come near, they’ll all disperse and grow as mild as babies.’