The old planter reeled terribly before the violent force of that staggering blow, but kept his face still turned bravely with undiminished courage toward the exultant enemy. At the sight of the gushing blood, however—the proud buckra blood, that shows so visibly on the delicate white European skin—the negroes behind set up a loud and horrid peal of unearthly laughter, and rushed forward, all their hesitation flung away at once, closing round him in a thickly packed body, each eager not to lose his own share in the delightful excitement of hacking him to pieces. A dozen cutlasses gleamed aloft at once in the bare black arms, and a dozen more blows were aimed at the wounded man fiercely by as many hideous, grinning rioters.
Uncle ’Zekiel and the household negroes, oblivious and almost unconscious of themselves, as domestic servants of their race always are in the presence of danger for their master or his family, pressed around the reeling white man in a serried ring, and with their sticks and arms, a frail barrier, strove manfully to resist the fierce onslaught of the yelling and leaping plantation negroes. In spite of what Mr Dupuy had just been saying about the negroes being all alike cowards, the petty handful of faithful blacks, forming a close and firm semicircle in front of their wounded master, fought like wild beasts at bay with hands and arms, and legs and teeth, and sticks and elbows, opposing stoutly, by fair means and foul, the ever-pressing sea of wild rioters. As they fought, they kept yielding slowly but cautiously before the steady pressure; and Mr Dupuy, reeling and staggering he knew not how, but with his face kept ever, like a fighting Dupuy, turned dauntlessly toward the surging enemy, retreated slowly backward step by step in the direction of his own piazza. Just as he reached the bottom of the steps, Uncle ’Zekiel meanwhile shielding and protecting him manfully with his portly person, a woman rushed forth from the mass of the rioters, and with hideous shrieks of ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah!’ hacked him once more with her blunt cutlass upon the ribs and body.
Mr Dupuy, faint and feeble from loss of blood, but still cool and collected as ever, groped his way ever backward up the steps, in a blind, reeling, failing fashion, and stood at last at bay in the doorway of the piazza, with his faithful bodyguard, wounded and bleeding freely like himself, still closing resolutely around him.
‘This will do, ’Zekiel,’ he gasped out incoherently, as he reached the top landing. ‘In the pass of the doorway. Stop them easily. Fire rouse the military. Hold the house for half an hour—help from the governor. Quick, quick! give me the pistol.’
Even as he spoke, a small white hand, delicate and bloodless, appearing suddenly from the room behind him, placed his little revolver, cocked and loaded, between the trembling fingers of his left hand, for the right lay already hacked and useless, hanging idly by his side in limp helplessness.
‘Nora, my dear,’ the old man sobbed out in a half-inarticulate gurgling voice, ‘go back—go back this moment to the boudoir. Back garden; slip away quietly—no place for you, Orange Grove, this evening. Slight trouble with the plantation blacks. Quell the rioters.—Close up, ’Zekiel.—Close up, Dick, Thomas, Jo, Robert, Emilius, Mark Antony!’ And with a quivering hand, standing there alone in the narrow doorway, while the mob below swarmed and pressed up the piazza steps in wild confusion, the wounded planter fired the revolver, with no definite aim, blank into the surging midst of the mob, and let his left hand drop as he did so, white and fainting by his side, with his vain endeavour.
The bullet had hit one of the negro women full in the thigh, and it only served still further to madden and enrage the clamouring mob, now frantically thirsty for the buckra blood.
‘Him wounded Hannah—him wounded Hannah!’ the negroes yelled in their buzzing indignation; and at the word, they rushed forward once more with mad gesticulations, those behind pushing those in front against the weak yielding wall of Orange Grove servants, and all menacing horribly with their blood-reddened cutlasses, as they shrieked aloud frantically: ‘Kill him—kill him!’
The servants still held firm with undaunted courage, and rallied bravely round their tottering master; but the onslaught was now far too fierce for them, and one by one they were thrust back helpless by the raging mob, who nevertheless abstained so far as possible from hurting any one of them, aiming all their blows directly at the detested white man himself alone. If by chance at any moment a cutlass came down unintentionally upon the broad backs of the negro defenders, a cry arose at once from the women in the rear of ‘Doan’t hit him—doan’t hit him. Him me brudder. Colour for colour! Kill de buckra! Hallelujah!’
And all this time, Nora Dupuy looked on from behind, holding her bloodless hands clasped downward in mute agony, not so much afraid as expectant, with Aunt Clemmy and the women-servants holding her and comforting her with well-meant negro consolation, under the heavy mahogany arch of the dining-room doorway.