The view of British constitutional procedure implied in Edward Hawthorn’s words was not perhaps strictly accurate; but his negro hearers would hardly have felt so much impressed if he had offered to lay their grievances boldly at the foot of that impersonal entity, the Colonial Office; while the idea that they were to have a direct spokesman, partly of their own blood, with the Queen herself, flattered their simple African susceptibilities and helped to cool their savage anger. Like children as they are, they began to smile and show their great white teeth in infantile satisfaction, as pleasantly as though they had never dreamt ten minutes earlier of hacking Harry Noel’s body fiercely into little pieces; and more than one voice cried out in hearty tones: ‘Hoorrah for Mr Hawtorn! Him de black man fren’. Gib him a cheer, boys! Him gwine to ’peak for us to Queen Victoria!’
‘Then promise me faithfully,’ Edward said, holding out his hand once more before him, ‘that you’ll all go home this very minute and settle down quietly in your own houses.’
‘We promise, sah,’ a dozen voices answered eagerly.
Edward Hawthorn turned anxiously for a moment to Louis Delgado. ‘My brother,’ he said to him rapidly in Arabic, ‘this is your doing. You must help me now to quiet the people you have first so fiercely and so foolishly excited. Assist me in dispersing them, and I will try to lighten for you the punishment which will surely be inflicted upon you as ringleader, when this is all over.’
But Delgado, propped in a stony attitude against the great wooden post of the piazza, answered still never a word. He stood there to all appearance in stolid and sullen indifference to all that was passing so vividly around him, with his white and bloodshot eyes staring vacantly into the blank darkness that stretched in front of him, behind the flickering light of the now collapsed and burnt-out cane-houses.
Edward touched him lightly on his bare arm. To his utter horror and amazement, though not cold, it was soft and corpse-like, as in the first hour of death, before rigidity and chilliness have begun to set in. He looked up into the bloodshot eyes. Their staring balls seemed already glazed and vacuous, utterly vacant of the fierce flashing light that had gleamed from the pupils so awfully and savagely but ten minutes before, as he brandished his cutlass with frantic yells above Harry Noel’s fallen body. Two of the plantation negroes, attracted by Edward’s evident recoil of horror, came forward with curiosity, flinging down their cutlasses, and touched the soft cheeks, not with the reverent touch which a white man feels always due to the sacredness of death, but harshly and rudely, as one might any day touch a senseless piece of stone or timber.
Edward looked at them with a pallid face of mute inquiry. The youngest of the two negroes drew back for a second, overtaken apparently by a superstitious fear, and murmured low in an awe-struck voice: ‘Him dead, sah, dead—stone dead. Dead dis ten minute, since ever you begin to ’peak to de people, sah.’
He was indeed. His suppressed rage at the partial failure of his deeply cherished scheme of vengeance on the hated white men, coming so close upon his paroxysm of triumph over the senseless bodies of Mr Dupuy and Harry Noel, had brought about a sudden fit of cardiac apoplexy. The old African’s savage heart had burst outright with conflicting emotions. Leaning back upon the pillar for support, as he felt the blood failing within him, he had died suddenly and unobserved without a word or a cry, and had stood there still, as men will often stand under similar circumstances, propped up against the supporting pillar, in the exact attitude in which death had first overtaken him. In the very crisis of his victory and his defeat, he had been called away suddenly to answer for his conduct before a higher tribunal than the one with which Edward Hawthorn had so gently and forbearingly threatened him.
The effect of this sudden catastrophe upon the impressionable minds of the excited negroes was indeed immediate and overwhelming. Lifting up their voices in loud wails and keening, as at their midnight wakes, they cried tremulously one after another: ‘De Lard is against us—de Lard is against us! Ebbery man to your tents, O Israel! De Lard hab killed Delgado—hab killed Delgado—hab smitten him down, for de murder him committed!’ To their unquestioning antique faith, it was the visible judgment of heaven against their insurrection, the blood of Theodore Dupuy and Harry Noel crying out for vengeance from the floor of the piazza, like the blood of righteous Abel long before, crying out for vengeance from the soil of Eden.
More than one of them believed in his heart, too, that the mysterious words in the unknown language which Edward Hawthorn had muttered over the old African were the spell that had brought down upon him before their very eyes the unseen bolt of the invisible powers. Whether it were obeah, or whether it were imprecation and solemn prayer to the God of heaven, they thought within themselves, in their dim, inarticulate, unspoken fashion, that ‘Mr Hawtorn word bring down de judgment dat very minute on Louis Delgado.’