Harry had no weapon of any sort with him except the frail riding-whip he carried in his hand; but without waiting for a second, without thinking for one instant of the surrounding danger, he rushed up the piazza steps, pushed the astonished rioters to right and left with his powerful arms, jumped over the senseless planter’s prostrate body, swept past Delgado into the narrow doorway, and there stood confronting the savage ringleader boldly, his little riding-whip raised high above his proud head with a fierce and threatening angry gesture. ‘Stop there!’ he cried, in a voice of stern command, that even in that supreme moment of passion and triumph had its full effect upon the enraged negroes. ‘Stop there, you mean-spirited villains and murderers! Not a step further—not a step further, I tell you! Cowards, cowards, every one of you, to kill a poor old man like that upon his own staircase, and to threaten a helpless innocent lady.’
As he spoke, he laid his hand heavily upon Louis Delgado’s bony shoulder, and pushed the old negro steadily backward, out of the doorway and through the piazza, to the front steps, where Mr Dupuy’s body was still lying untended and bleeding profusely. ‘Stand back, Delgado!’ he cried out fiercely and authoritatively. ‘Stand back this minute, and put down your cutlass! If you want to fight the whites, you cowardly scoundrels you, why don’t you fight the men like yourselves, openly and straightforward, instead of coming by night, without note or warning, burning and hacking and killing and destroying, and waging war against defenceless old men and women and children?’
The negroes fell back a little grudgingly, as he spoke, and answered him only by the loud and deep guttural cry—an inarticulate, horribly inhuman gurgle—which is their sole possible form of speech in the very paroxysm of African passion. Louis Delgado held his cutlass half doubtfully in his uplifted hand: he had tasted blood once now; he had laid himself open to the fierce vengeance of the English law; he was sorely tempted in the whirlwind of the moment to cut down Harry Noel too, as he had cut down the white-headed old planter the minute before. But the innate respect of the essentially fighting negro for a resolute opponent held him back deliberating for a moment; and he drew down his cutlass as quickly as he had raised it, divided in mind whether to strike or to permit a parley.
Noel seized the occasion with intuitive strategy. ‘Here you, my friends,’ he cried boldly, turning round towards the cowering Orange Grove servants—‘is this the way you defend your master? Pick him up, some of you—pick him up this minute, I tell you, and lay him out decently on the sofa over yonder.—There, there; don’t be afraid. Not one of these confounded rogues and cowards dares to touch you or come one pace nearer you as long as you’re doing it. If he does! cutlass or no cutlass, I’ll break this riding-whip to pieces, I tell you, across his black head as soon as look at him.’ And he brandished the whip angrily in front of him, towards the mad and howling group of angry rioters, held at bay for the moment on the piazza steps by that solitary, undismayed, young Englishman with his one frail and ridiculous weapon.
The rioters howled all the louder at his words, and leaped and grinned and chattered and gesticulated like wild beasts behind an iron railing; but not one of them ventured to be the first in aiming a blow with his deadly implement at Harry Noel. They only yelled once more incomprehensibly in their deep gutturals, and made hideous wild grimaces, and waved their cutlasses frantically around them with horrible inarticulate negro imprecations.
But Harry stood there firm and unyielding, facing the maddened crowd with his imperious manner, and overawing them in spite of themselves with that strange power of a superior race over the inferior in such critical moments of intense passion.
The Orange Grove servants, having fresh courage put into their failing breasts once more by the inspiring presence of a white man at their sides, and being true at heart to their poor master, as negro house-servants always are and always have been in the worst extremities, took advantage of the momentary lull in the storm to do as Harry told them, and lift Mr Dupuy’s body up from the ground, laying it carefully on the piazza sofa. ‘That’s better,’ Harry said, as they finished their task.—‘Now, we must go on and drive away these murderous rascals. If we don’t drive them away, my good friends, they’ll kill Miss Nora—they’ll kill Miss Nora. Would you have it said of you that you let a parcel of murderous plantation rioters kill your own dead master’s daughter right before your very faces?’
As he spoke, he saw a pale face, pale, not with fear, but with terrible anger, standing mutely and immovably beside him; and next moment he heard Nora Dupuy’s voice crying out deeply, in the very echo of his own angry words: ‘Cowards, cowards!’
At the sight of the hated Dupuy features, the frenzied plantation hands seemed to work themselves up into a fresh access of ungovernable fury. With indescribable writhings and mouthings and grimaces, their hatred and vengeance found articulate voice for a moment at least, and they cried aloud like one man: ‘Kill her—kill her! Kill de missy! Kill her—kill her!’
‘Give me a pistol,’ Harry Noel exclaimed wildly to the friendly negroes close behind his back: ‘a gun—a knife—a cutlass—anything!’